We are pleased to announce the availability of the Micro Focus Operations Bridge 2018.02 release. With this release, we continue our commitment to deliver the containerized enterprise monitoring solution with integrated capabilities, flexible deployment, dynamic scaling and simplified maintenance. In this blog post, you will get an insight into the highlights of this release and a brief outlook into future developments.

Below is a quick summary of the main features of the Operations Bridge 2018.02 release (each will be reviewed in detail in the following sections):

• Enterprise-readiness enhancements
• Store Once (SO) capability
• New and updated content
• Operations Bridge Manager (OBM – formerly OMi), Operations Bridge Reporter (OBR) and Business Value Dashboard (BVD) enhancements
• NetIQ AppManager integration
• Documentation portal enhancements
• New Operations Bridge Express edition

Before we start with the description of new features, we would like to give you an overview of the components we have released:

• Container Deployment Foundation (CDF) 2018.01
• New version of Operations Bridge Reporter (OBR) 10.30 (Classic and Container deployment)
• New versions of Operations Bridge Event Management (OBM 10.64), Reporting (OBR 10.30) and BVD 10.64 (Container deployment)
• New Store Once (SO) capability (Container deployment)

Besides the updates mentioned above, we have also released new content that includes:

• Management Packs 2018.03 (Premium Management Packs, part of the Operations Bridge Management Pack Media) containing Management Packs 2017.12 and the new version of the Management Pack for SAP 2.0.
• Management Packs on the ITOM Marketplace: Management Pack for Amazon Web Services (AWS) 1.50, Management Pack for Microsoft Azure 2.30 and Management Pack for Apache Web Server.

Operations Bridge Manager: New Product Name

With the Operations Bridge 2018.02 release, we introduce the new product name for Operations Manager i (OMi) – Operations Bridge Manager (OBM), which is aligned with the overall Operations Bridge naming pattern (Operations Bridge Manager, Operations Bridge Analytics, Operations Bridge Reporter). This change applies to containerized Operations Bridge only (OMi is still the product name in the Classic version). Note that the name “OMi” is still contained in some product areas, for example in view names/CI types (OMi Deployment, OMi Gateway server), in the CLI as well as in the existing Management Packs (the new Management Packs already use the new product name). Note that we do not plan to rename any CLIs – they will keep their opr- prefix.

Micro Focus Rebranding: New Look & Feel

We are delighted to introduce the new look & feel of our product components (Operations Bridge 2018.02 Container version and Operations Bridge Reporter 10.30 Classic version), which have been re-designed to adopt the Micro Focus brand:

Enterprise-Ready Operations Bridge Premium Container Deployment

With the current release, we further improved our enterprise readiness by introducing the following enhancements:

• New Container Deployment Foundation (CDF) version 2018.01
• Oracle/Oracle RAC 12c as the database for CDF/OBM
• Embedded PostgreSQL now supporting High Availability (HA)
• The ability to add OBM HA after the initial configuration
• Changing the way to configure external databases
• OBM OA run as non-root inside OBM containers

On the CDF side, we are happy to announce the availability of CDF 2018.01, with improved stability, resilience and performance achieved by upgrading key open source software container images (Kubernetes 1.8.x, Docker 1.6.1 and 3rd party).

Database High Availability (HA) is implemented by using Embedded PostgreSQL that now supports HA setups and external Oracle RAC support for CDF and OBM.

We have also changed the process for configuring external databases: previously, you had to enter DB admin credentials when configuring the external PostgreSQL database. With the current release, your database administrator needs to set up the PostgreSQL/Oracle database upfront (using our scripts and documentation), so there is no need for you to enter DB admin credentials as part of the Operations Bridge configuration.

In addition, we have added more flexibility to the Operations Bridge HA feature: while in earlier releases it was not possible to re-configure and enable HA once the OBM installation has been completed, with the current release, you can start without HA and add HA later as part of reconfiguration. For more information on how HA is implemented in Operations Bridge, see the blog Exploring High Availability capabilities of the Operations Bridge Container Deployment.

Store Once

Store Once is the first version of the ITOM next-generation unified big-data platform consolidating multiple domains and providing consumable cross-domain services (dashboarding, reporting, analytics) across all collected data. Based on Micro Focus Vertica and ITOM CDF, it initially collects system metrics from Operations Agents. Going forward, this platform will be utilized and shared across all ITOM products and will act as single real-time data collection and streaming point, with the collection of topology, events, metrics and logs across physical, virtual, on-premise and cloud deployments. The system metric collection in OBM is just an initial step towards this innovative, highly scalable and easy-to-use solution.

The Store Once capability is enabled during the Operations Bridge installation. As this capability is based on Vertica, select the Dedicated Vertica installation for run in production environments. For evaluation purposes, select Vertica in a pre-configured container. After the capability is installed and required configuration steps are carried out, you can stream system metric data to SO using the Operations Agent (streaming of basic metrics from all systems and streaming of detailed metrics from selected systems is supported). The streamed data can then be accessed by Performance Dashboard to graph the system metric data and Business Value Dashboard to show lightweight reports on system metrics.

In the screenshot below, you can see an example of the BVD showing system metric reports from SO:

For detailed steps on how to install and configure SO, how to configure metric streaming to SO and how to set up the access to the streamed data for PD and BVD, see the Operations Bridge help center.

OBM Enhancements

• Bing Map has been enhanced due to re-implementation of the Geographical Map (GeoMap) component (the old Bing API is no longer supported). The new GeoMap uses Bing Maps V8 Control API. You need to provide your own Bing API key to use the online mode of the Geo Map. You can get an API key for free for Limited Use or purchase a license. All previously supported features remain supported in the current release; on top of it comes the option to use Geo Map offline mode without the API key, as well as zooming in down to street level and saving zoom levels. You can also use a dark color scheme by checking the “Use Dark Theme” box in Geographical Map preferences.
• The updated opr-node CLI now has the option to check the node configuration: opr-node -node_config_report. Using this option, you can verify if assigned policies are actually deployed on the node and make sure that the actual state of things reflects the desired state of things. A mismatch can occur in situations where, for example, an administrator temporarily deleted policies during troubleshooting, or the Operations Agent was not reachable when deployment happened and the deployment job has been deleted.
• New Generic Output from Windows Event Log policy editor. With this enhancement, you can use HTML5 policy editors for the Generic Output from Windows Event Log policy (in previous versoins, only the raw policy editor was available), which significantly simplifies policy editing.

Operations Bridge Reporter (OBR) Enhancements

• Added support for Microsoft Windows 2016, RedHat 7.3, Oracle Enterprise Linux 7.3
• Updated components: Vertica 9.0.1, Business Objects 4.2 SP5
• Server migration documentation: A new white paper describing how to move an OBR server in the distributed environment on Window/Linux to another Linux server
• Rebranded Classic version

NetIQ AppManager Integration

Another important addition to the release is the new Operations Connector for NetIQ AppManager that allows you to set up the topology and event integration between OBM/OMi and NetIQ AppManager. The following is supported with this integration:

• Node discovery
• Event integration, including mapping event to corresponding Node CIs
• Two new views to check NetIQ deployment and which CIs were integrated by which connector (not meant for daily operator use): NetIQAppManager_Infrastructure and NetIQAppManager_Deployment
• Operators use their normal views showing nodes they are responsible for – in which AppManager nodes appear as well

BVD Enhancements

On the BVD side, we have moved the settings from the BVD Configuration Container UI to the BVD Admin UI in order to avoid downtimes when changing settings.

Updated Management Packs

The following enhancements are included in the latest versions of the Management Packs:

Management Pack for Microsoft Azure 2.30:

• Discovery and monitoring for Microsoft Azure App Services
• Discovery of Microsoft Active Directory
• App Services are a PaaS offering that have computing resources and runtime environments managed by Microsoft Azure
• With App Service, you pay for the Azure compute resources you use. The compute resources you use is determined by the App Service plan.
• An application in Azure App Service can be associated with only one App Service plan at any given time
• Both App Services and App Service Plans are contained in a resource group

Management Pack for Amazon Web Services 1.50:

• Discovery and monitoring of Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
• Discovery and monitoring for Amazon S3
• Data Collection for Amazon Billing

Read the blog Now monitor PaaS services with AWS 1.5 and Azure 2.3 Management Pack releases to learn more about the key highlights of our updated Management Packs.

Management Pack for SAP 2.0:

• Simplified configuration (no manual configuration is required for discovery​)
• Enhanced discovery covering distributed and high-availability environments​
• Latest SAP NetWeaver RFC SDK Support​
• Enhanced job monitoring 
• Performance Dashboards for SAP ABAP and J2EE Application Servers
• SAP Collectors registered as Agent Components
• Miscellaneous performance improvements

Management Pack for Apache Web Server:

• Enables Apache log streaming to Operations Bridge Analytics

Operations Connector for SLM

• Retrieves the SLM data from APM for OBR SLM reports
• Retrieves the data from APM SLM via Rest APIs and then stores the data into the Operations Agent for the OBR Content Pack to retrieve the data into OBR
• Available on the ITOM Marketplace

Documentation Portal Enhancements

The Operations Bridge documentation has been migrated to the MediaWiki platform. The improvements include the possibility of search in the current section as well as search in all products (available via Advanced Search). You can easily print the current page or the whole section to a pdf as well as leave comments on the documentation.

Operations Bridge Express

Last but not least, we are pleased to announce that we have changed the Operations Bridge Express edition by making Micro Focus SiteScope the key product of our Express offering. Sitescope is an agentless monitoring solution that provides 100 out-of-the-box monitors types and solution templates for the URL, systems and application monitoring. Among the benefits of using SiteScope are quick time to value, low initial costs, simple deployment and maintenance, customizable alerting and reporting capabilities as well as support for multi-cloud and container monitoring.

Operations Bridge Express is available for 5 nodes as a 5-pack or as a 50-pack for 50 , 250 and 1000 nodes. For each node of the node pack, you are entitled to the following:

• All SiteScope solution templates, as well as SiteScope monitors (except for Transaction Monitoring)
• Monitors of the following type: URL, URL Content, URL List, URL Sequence, Web Service, Link Check, XML Metrics
• URL entitlement for 5 URLs for every Operations Bridge node

To aggregate across multiple OpsBridge Express (SiteScope) servers and other third-party tools, you can add Operations Bridge Premium or Ultimate editions to your Operations Bridge Express. To add agent-based monitoring to your deployment, you can upgrade Operations Bridge Express to Operations Bridge System Collector URL monitoring.

For more information on the agentless monitoring using SiteScope, please take a look at the SiteScope documentation.

If you have feedback or suggestions, don’t hesitate to comment on this article.

Explore full capabilities of Operations Bridge by taking a look at our Operations Manager i, Operations Bridge Analytics, Operations Bridge Reporter, Operations Connector (OpsCx), Business Value Dashboard (BVD) and Operations Orchestration (OO) documentation!

Events

To get more information on this release and how customers are using Operations Bridge, we are happy to announce the following event you can register for:

Micro Focus Universe, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco, March 13-15, 2018 – register now

Read all our news at the Operations Bridge blog.

References

Explore all the capabilities of the Operations Bridge and technology integrations by visiting these sites:

• Operations Bridge
• Operations Manager i
• Operations Bridge Technology Integrations eBook