In the 12 years that I’ve been part of the ZENworks Product Management team I’ve met with hundreds if not thousands of customers. Through that time there have been some definite trends that I heard around ZENworks bundles. It’s taken until ZENworks 2020 to put all of the right pieces in place to address these concerns, but with ZENworks 2020 I’m very proud of the changes we’ve made to address these challenges, including:

• Bundle deployment status is hard to understand
• Bundle status doesn’t always seem correct
• You need more information, faster

If you’ve met me, you’ll also know that I’m a geek at heart. So instead of talking to you about the cool dashboards and the nifty enhancements, which   already did in his post , I want to take a minute and make sure you know what’s changed behind the scenes. Here’s the magic that facilitates the improved status experience:

• To make the system faster we’ve removed the need for bundle status information to roll-up through the collection server. This means that your status data is now sent directly to your Configuration Primary server configured in your location / network environment server rules. This means status should usually be available within 30 mins of a bundle operation occurring.
• Given change #1 we were conscious that we needed to minimize the amount of data being sent, so we’ve made sure we’re only sending changes, except when the server tells the agent to send a complete status. We’ve also made sure that we are using highly compressed data to ensure the smallest wire footprint possible.
• To ensure the accuracy of the data, every status record is now versioned. This means the first status sent is 1.0, then the next delta is 1.1, then 1.2, and so forth. If for some reason the server misses a status record and receives one that’s out of order, then it will instruct the agent to send a complete status instead of a delta status and replace any status information in the database with the new data, incrementing the version to 2.0. This ensures that the data in the DB gets reconciled with the actual data on the device when an event such as re-imaging a workstation occurs.
• To help provide faster reporting and dashboarding we’ve also separated the Patch Bundle status and Application Bundle status into separate tables. This may be of interest if you have custom reports you’ve built as you may need to adjust the queries.
• On the agent side we’ve made changes to the actual data being sent to provide important data such as the parent bundle that launched the application, the amount of time it took to install, distribute or launch the bundle, and more. We’ve also made sure that the status data gives you a complete picture of the Distribution, Install and Launch status, instead of hiding this in a converged Deployments status.
• Finally, in very large environments, bundle status data can be migrated to the VERTICA database to provide improved performance and reduce load on the RDBMS. We typically recommend doing this only under the guidance of the Micro Focus Support team.

The ZENworks team understands just how critical it is for you to have an accurate picture of your bundle deployments and I think you’ll find the new status experience much improved in ZENworks 2020. Remember though, that because there are both server side and agent side changes, you won’t see a fully improved picture until you’ve upgraded your servers and deployed the agent to the endpoints. I look forward to hearing from you about your experiences with the new and improved status capabilities.