What’s New in FrameFlow v2021.9
Learn All About Our Brand New Features
Major Updates for FrameFlow 2021.9
FrameFlow 2021.9 is live! Our new release contains plenty of brand new features that we're excited to share with you in this article.
These days, more and more enterprises are operating in a hybrid environment with some services in the cloud and others hosted on-premises. For this new release, we focused on augmenting our support for hybrid environments by adding new support for cloud-based services, new notification options, and much more. Let's take a look!
AWS Billing Event Monitor
It's important to keep track of cloud service costs not only for your regular budgeting but also to detect runaway cost events and unexpected increases in service usage.
FrameFlow v2021.9 adds a new event monitor that helps keep track of what your company spends on AWS services. Over time, it gathers data on your regular spending habits and will alert you if you're on track to exceed them this month. It uses data from Amazon AWS to forecast your bill for the next month as well.
You can also specify a price per month that you'd like to stay under and FrameFlow will notify you if you're on track to exceed that limit. The data generated by this event monitor can be displayed on dashboards.
AWS Billing Graph
AWS Discovery Event Monitor
Also new in this release is an addition to our pre-existing discovery event monitors: the AWS Discovery Event Monitor. Whereas the other three search for devices on-premises, this event monitor searches the cloud for any AWS instances not yet added to your monitoring configuration. Once a device is discovered, the event monitor will appear in the folder that you select. You can also choose what the default device and display names will be for discovered devices.
We've also added an option called "Hosting" to the Settings page for your devices. If you set the hosting type to "Cloud (Amazon AWS)" a new AWS tab will appear for the network device. There you can access information about the device that would otherwise only be accessible in the Amazon Web Services interface, like the OS, IP addresses, instance type, etc. This way, all the relevant info for all of your devices is in one place.
AWS Tab Creation
This feature has the potential to save you a wealth of time that would have otherwise been spent onboarding new AWS instances by hand or accessing the AWS interface to obtain information about your devices.
Microsoft Azure Billing and Discovery Event Monitors
The two above features are also available for Azure with our two new Microsoft Azure event monitors. They have much the same options as the AWS Billing Event Monitor and the AWS Discovery Event Monitor. Use them to keep track of spending and onboard new devices for your Azure assets! You can use the Hosting option to reveal an Azure tab in individual devices that will let you access information from the Azure interface just like with AWS above.
Device Drilldown
Another freshly added feature is our new dashboard panel called Device Drilldown that lets you examine your monitoring configuration with increasing granularity. It begins with a top-down view of your major device groups and lets you "drill down" until you reach a singular device.
Alerts are color-coded and will appear on your dashboard in order of priority. The number of alerts that apply to a device is also shown here. Device Drill Down makes sure your dashboards clearly display the most pressing matters first, letting you and your team make a fully informed decision on what problem to tackle first.
Device Drilldown
New: Microsoft Teams Notifications
We've also added new support for Microsoft Teams notifications. You can now opt to receive monitoring alerts as Teams messages in addition to our regular email, Telemetry, and other options. Teams users can then subscribe to the Teams channel receiving FrameFlow alerts and receive push notifications. You can even send notifications to multiple channels! To enable FrameFlow to send notifications to Teams, you need to enable it in your integration settings and then choose the Teams notification option in FrameFlow's Notifications: Profiles section. Full details for both of these steps are in the Help section.
Visual Guide to Adding Teams Notifications
New: PagerDuty Notifications
PagerDuty users rejoice! You can now connect your PagerDuty account to your FrameFlow configuration and automatically assign tasks to members of your team. PagerDuty is an incident response tool that lets you organize your apps and services to keep stakeholders informed in real time. Connecting your PagerDuty account to FrameFlow lets your event monitor alerts automatically create incidents in your PagerDuty account.
This notification option is also available in the Notifications: Profiles section and you can access step-by-step instructions in the Help section.
VMware Discovery Event Monitor
Another new feature included in this release is an event monitor that detects and automatically adds newfound VMWare products to a device group. The VMware Discovery Event Monitor works in the background, constantly scanning for new VMs to add to your monitoring configuration. When it finds and automatically onboards a device, it will drop it into the folder you specify.
VMware Discovery Event Monitor Options
Just like our other discovery event monitors, it can save you lots of time by taking a traditionally manual task and automating it for you.
Network Diagrams
Also in this update are some redesigns and ease of access changes. We added arrowheads to our network diagrams feature that allow you to indicate direction and make diagrams easier to interpret at a glance. The arrows can be straight or curved, allowing for more ways to represent your monitoring configurations than ever before.
We added an option to choose icon backgrounds, which works with the arrowhead feature to keep things looking tidy. There are a variety of shapes to choose from when creating your icon backgrounds as well. The color of the icon backgrounds depends on the state of the network device that the icon represents.
Arrowheads Indicating Direction of Ping Checks
New Alert Suppression Option
For a long time now, you've been able to pause devices and event monitors for a specified amount of time. In FrameFlow v2021.9, you can now do the same thing when suppressing alerts that appear in Headquarters and other parts of the FrameFlow interface. This makes sure you don't forget to unsuppress alerting when the time comes.
"Suppress Until" Option
Available Now
FrameFlow v2021.9 is available now. To upgrade, log into your account on our website and select the downloads tab. If you have comments or suggestions, send them our way. We’d love to hear what you think about the new features and functionality.
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