We’re very pleased to announce the general availability of Resource Manager 6.2 and Control Center 1.5.1.
Release Summary:
Model update improvements. The model is a vast web of physical, virtual, and logical relationships between your IT resources. Customers trust the model to be an accurate representation of their hybrid data center resources, and use it to accelerate issue investigation and resolution. With this release, we’ve made changes to invalidation processing in the collector and hub services. In prior releases, small model updates would be queued behind large updates. The model would lag behind reality and complicate troubleshooting tasks. This release enables multiple model changes to be executed in parallel.
Nearly 200 customer-requested usability, reliability, serviceability and performance changes. The multigraph report generator, in particular, received several usability improvements, helping customers make use of the recently added multigraph dashboard portlet.
The Internet Explorer browser is no longer supported. We shall miss it. Or not.
Who should upgrade? Everyone!
One of the key changes we made is invisible to most but generates huge quality improvements. The Zenoss as a Service team upgraded many customers before we announced this, expanding our test footprint dramatically. We clone the environment, upgrade the clone, test thoroughly, and only then promote it to production.
The results of this change are obvious. We’ve had fewer customer-reported upgrade issues than in any prior release. Better, faster upgrades directly help customers with improvements to the overall availability service-level indicator.
By the way, you can build a simple service-level indicator dashboard using the self-monitoring code. Here’s mine, showing model updates and errors (None!), measurement and event rates, and availability of the user interface and data collection layer.
Two notes:
- If you’re moving from a 5.x version, you can significantly reduce upgrade time by following the steps in this Knowledge Base article.
- Always read release notes. The Zenoss Resource Manager v6.2 Release Notes and Zenoss Control Center v1.5.1 Release Notes are on the Zenoss documentation pages.
What’s next? Themes!
We’re making a change in the way we plan the content of releases. Each release will have a theme that will guide approximately half of the investment for a release. We will focus on solving a closely related set of customer issues with the intent of creating noticeable improvements. Our goal is to deliver one themed release per quarter, although our mileage will undoubtedly vary.
Our next major release theme is on ZenHub improvements. All incoming events, model changes and outgoing configuration changes flow through the ZenHub container, and we chose this as the next focus for our ongoing service level indicator improvements.
By the way, my new favorite article is “Roadmaps are a Waste of Time,” which explains, “Your roadmaps are snapshots in time in this world. Where you were, and what you thought at the time,” and goes on to outline a nice six-week planning process. Read it — it will probably help you with project delivery!
Tired of upgrades? Despair not, Zenoss Cloud is here!
With Zenoss Cloud, you’ll never have to run another upgrade process. The SaaS platform is serverless and updated without downtime, and the familiar Resource Manager code behind the collection zones updates faster than ever. Hmm, sounds like another article is coming!
If you’re tired of upgrades, we can show you how to never do an upgrade again. Let’s explore Zenoss Cloud together!
