Version 8.3.0

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Edition | Version 8.3.0 | Release 07/05/2022

GroundWork 8.3.0 introduces many requested new features from the GroundWork community. The popular GroundWork Messenger templating engine has been extended with new macros. 8.3.0 introduces the GroundWork Messenger Generic Scripting feature, for integrators to build powerful custom notification solutions.

The Grafana Data Source now runs separately from GroundWork and can be installed into the most recent versions of the popular Grafana dashboard.

The 8.3.0 release further expands GroundWork’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) connector to support dynamic labeling of metrics using pattern matching and translation.

Further open source contributions have been made to Telegraf, including improvements to the GroundWork output plugin and a new Classify processor plugin. These are now used in support of advanced Syslog Monitoring and SNMP Monitoring.

GroundWork Messenger New Features

· GroundWork Messenger message templating UI now supports macros for Host Address, Host Notes, and Contact Details including phone numbers and primary & alternate email addresses

· New Feature: Generic scripting, the Messenger now supports notifications and alerts to be customized to report to any product over a scripting end point

· Improvements to Groundwork Messenger Secure (TLS) transmission of mail messages

· Improvements to logging and debugging of the status of messages

GroundWork Grafana Improvements

· The GroundWork Grafana DataSource now runs independently outside of GroundWork product.

· The data source can now retrieve metrics from remote GroundWork servers

· Grafana support has been upgraded to latest version

· Grafana is now optionally packaged with the GroundWork installers

APM (Application Performance Monitoring Prometheus) Connector

· The APM Connector now supports regex filtering of metrics. We had multiple requests from customers to filter out excessive metrics coming from Prometheus Exposition formatted end points

· New Feature: Dynamic Metrics Labeling using pattern matching to match labels and re-label

AWS CloudHub Connector Feature

· The AWS CloudHub Connector now fully supports filtering (white list, black list) of AWS labels on EC2 instances and other resources.

Syslog Monitoring with GroundWork Telegraf Plugin

· Fully support Syslog Monitoring in GW8 with Telegraf agent and GroundWork Telegraf Plugin

SNMP Monitoring with Telegraf

· All SNMPTT (Simple Network Management Protocol Trap Translator) monitoring scripts have been converted to work with the Telegraf Metrics Agent as Telegraf TOML configurations.

· Telegraf output plugin can now configure its app type

RS Tools

· New Feature to clone SLA dashboards including all of its widgets

· BSM Export Import of tree structures

System and Command Line Utilities

· Backup script now backs up all volumes, both GroundWork and user defined volumes

Nagios

· Include more Perl packages in Monarch and Nagios

Status Summary (Viewer) and Dashboard

· Several important improvements to Threshold Overrides

· Host Group sorting and display improvements

· Downtime Comments are now displayed on Status page

· SLA Status improvements and fixes to dashboard

Security Vulnerabilities

· Java SDK upgraded to fix security vulnerabilities

· Log4J fixes applied to fix recent 2021-22 security vulnerabilities

Bug Fixes

· Scripted Downtime Deletions fixed

· AIX GDMA updated to latest GDMA fixes

· GroundWork Messenger fix to not notify on deleted hosts

· GroundWork Status Summary improvements to availability bar when over 30 days in the past

· GroundWork Status Summary various bug fixes for Status Overrides

· Scheduled Downtime Depth bug fixed

· RSTools CRON job runaway bug fixed

· RSTools BSM caching and group bug fixes

· GroundWork Messenger Pager Duty bug fix for quoted values

· Bug fixes to LDAP and SSO for Unicode

· Invalid License Prevents Login bug fixed

Known Issues and Limitations

This section lists any known issues and limitations with work-arounds.

Category	Title/Description	Work-around
LDAP	Cannot delete users created by LDAP sync. If you sync LDAP to GroundWork, the users who log in are imported. There's not much point in deleting them unless you disconnect the LDAP server, but even if you do so, the delete function isn't working.	There is a work-around, but then again there's no harm in leaving these user accounts alone. They will fail login once the LDAP server is inactive. If you really must delete them, please contact support.
Nagios Container	It's possible to overload the Nagios instance in GroundWork. Nagios uses workers that communicate with the services it runs. In some cases the default provisioning isn't enough to keep up with a really active alert stream.	You can override the default provisioning of workers in Nagios with the check_workers directive. See How to configure check_workers.
TCG-SNMP restart generates unknown status	When restarting the (new) TCG-SNMP connector, the initial poll may generate UNKNOWN status for the network interfaces.	We recommend adjusting the notification rules for this to avoid alarm fatigue.
Cron-Controlled GroundWork containers generate SUSPENDED alerts	Jobs scheduled VIA the cron container generate SUSPENDED alerts. This is correct behavior, but may cause unwanted alarms.	We recommend adjusting the notification rules for this to avoid alarm fatigue. A separate rule for the DOCK-H:cadvisor group with a 1-minute delay can suppress these alarms.
Unattended mode install is not enabled	The installer won't support the --unattended mode option to install standalone with default settings in this version.	This convenience feature will be enabled again in future versions.
Archive Migration initially incomplete	Upgrades to the system will migrate the foundation database but will not completely migrate the archive database until the first archive run (overnight in the cron timezone)	This may affect any queries you want to run against the archive database, especially those for host address values, but only for the day of upgrade.

Announcements

For those who use GroundWork to monitor a large inventory, you should see a number of performance enhancements in 8.3.0. Various performance parameters can be changed in config, however, this should be done with caution. These performance parameters target a system with 32Gb of memory, thus our recommended (but not required) system specifications have changed to reflect this.

Supported Versions

Current supported versions of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise include the latest versions 8.3.0, 8.2.3, 8.2.2, 8.2.1, 8.2.0, 8.1.3, and version 7.2.1. Support for version 7.2.1 will expire December 31, 2022 (see GroundWork Monitor Enterprise Sunset note below). Support for 8.0.x is now expired. For supported architectures and browser compatibility see System Requirements.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 7.x Sunsetting

Support for version 7.2.1 will expire December 31, 2022.

We have extended support for 7.2.x for another year, to give some of the more complex customers in our installed base more time to transition. GroundWork 7.x will be retired from active support at the end of this year. Customers with support contracts for GroundWork Monitor 7.x will continue to receive support from GroundWork Support for this version until December 31, 2022, and for 8.x thereafter. It's our goal at GroundWork Open Source to make the transition from GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 7.x to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 8 as seamless as possible for our Customers and Partners. Please contact GroundWork Support and let us help you plan and make this transition.

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System Requirements

Copyright 2004-2022 GroundWork Open Source, Inc. ("GroundWork"). All rights reserved. Use is subject to GroundWork commercial license terms. GroundWork Monitor products are released under the terms of the various public and commercial licenses. For information on licensing and open source elements please see Licenses used in GroundWork. GroundWork, GroundWork Open Source, GroundWork Monitor Professional, GroundWork Monitor Open Source, GroundWork Community Edition, GroundWork Monitor Enterprise, GroundWork Foundation, GroundWork Status Viewer, Monarch, and GroundWork Guava are trademarks of GroundWork Open Source, Inc. Other trademarks, logos and service marks (each, a "Mark") used in GroundWork’s products, including Nagios, which is a registered trademark of Ethan Galstad, are the property of other third parties. These Marks may not be used without the prior written consent of GroundWork Open Source or the third party that owns the respective Mark.