Hyperic HQ 4.1 Sneak Peek

For those of you who want a sneak peek into our upcoming 4.1 release of Hyperic HQ, look no further. Over the past several months, we have spent a lot of time listening to our customers which has helped sculpt and drive this upcoming release of Hyperic HQ.

On top of that, we have decided to embark down a new path which will be beneficial to everyone, especially our customers. This new path means we will be doing quarterly releases to Hyperic HQ. It’s very exciting news internally for our engineering team because now they can crank out new features four times a year!

Below you will find the full list of expected features and improvements coming out sometime in mid-March. These features are all queued up to make this dot release but we of course reserve the right to add/remove as neccessary.

FEATURE UPDATES

HQ Web Services API Updates – The web services API will include a set of command line tools for performing administration and configuration tasks. You will be able to use command line tools to access and update information about inventory, metric templates, alerts, escalations, users, and roles.

MySQL Product Plugin Updates – The MySQL plugin has been optimized to use a minimal amount of queries to capture all performance stats, thereby reducing the impact monitoring could have on overall performance. Replication monitoring has also been added.

NEW FEATURES

Audit Logger – Events around changes to alerts will now be written to the database with an indication of the user that performed the action. Auditing will also optionally be configured to write to a log file.

Support for Private Groups – Users that are authorized to create groups may designate a group to be “private”.  Private groups are invisible to other users, including admin users.  You will be able to share a private group by associating it with a role.

Additional “Add to Group” Options – You will be able to add a resource to an existing, as well as a new, group on the Browse Resource page.

Additional Delete Option – The Tools menu for any resource will allow you to delete the resource, or add it to a new group.

Additional Alert Acknowledge and Fix Options – New options on the Alert Center page will allow you to acknowledge and fix selected alerts, and to annotate acknowledgments.  A new option in the Recent Alerts portlet will allow you to acknowledge Alerts as well as fix them.

Search Returns Usernames – The Search button in upper right corner of each page in user interface now returns users, as well as resources.

INFRASTRUCTURE CHANGES

HQ Support for Oracle 11g – The HQ database will be able to run on Oracle 11G. Support for Oracle 9i will be deprecated.

JBoss Server Upgrade – HQ Server will be deployed using JBoss 4.2.3. This will be an upgrade from JBoss 4.0.3 SP1 used in previous HQ releases.

Asynchronous Resource Deletion – When you click the Delete button on the Browse Resource tab, selected resources will be deleted from the database asynchronously.  Although the resources will immediately disappear from the resource listing in the HQ user interface, there may be a short delay before resources are deleted from the database.

SUPPORT IMPROVEMENTS

New HQ Health Database Queries – The Database tab on the HQ Health page will have new queries, one that returns a count of stalled escalations, and two that show database locks and activity.  The new queries are troubleshooting aids for Hyperic support.

HQ Health Database Actions – Actions will be available on the Database tab of the HQ Health page. A purge auto-inventory queue action will allow you to delete the contents of the queue, in the event that you are having trouble importing resources. Another new action will allow you to purge stalled escalations that were detected with the stalled escalation query.

License Expiration Email – HQ Enterprise will issue email notifications that your HQ license expiration is near.  Email notifications commence 45 days prior to license expiration.

Well, there you have it folks. The tenative list of features, changes, and improvements due out in mid-March. We are always listening to our customers and potential customers regarding new system management features so if you’ve got something you’d like to see in our next release, please post a comment below.

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