We are very happy to announce that FrameFlow 2019.3 has been released. It's available for download through your account on our web site. If you're evaluating FrameFlow then simply download the eval version again. Either way, run the setup and it will take care of the upgrade while preserving all of your settings and monitoring configuration.
This new release includes a number of new features and in this newsletter we would like to tell you a bit about them.
The major new features are:
We found a couple of issues in the initial 2019.3 release so if you've already upgraded, check your build number by clicking on the FrameFlow logo at the top left of the interface and looking in the About section. The build you want is 4484. If you're running an earlier build, download and upgrade again.
FrameFlow Telemetry is a new service, available for free for all users with an active subscription license.
Telemetry has four major components:
Telemetry is a cloud-based service that we host and maintain. It is only available for FrameFlow subscription customers. If you currently have a perpetual license, we can convert your license to a subscription for just a little more than your current annual support and maintenance renewals. Contact us for details.
Python is a scripting language that we are seeing more and more at customer sites. It runs on multiple platforms, including Windows and Linux, and has an easier learning curve when compared to some other scripting languages.
FrameFlow 2019.3 adds a new Python event monitor that lets you develop or integrate Python scripts with our monitoring and alerting engines. Just like our PowerShell event monitor, you can use our Python event monitor to tackle those special monitoring tasks that are unique to your IT environment.
IT departments large and small are responsible for maintaining complicated systems. For example, an Enterprise Resource Planning solution might consist of web servers, database servers, and applications server all sitting on top of a SAN and various networking components.
Of course you can monitor all of these components individually but how do you judge the health of the system as a whole?
Our new Business Process event monitor lets you do exactly that. With this new event monitor you can define multiple units of a business process and then associate data points with them. Each unit starts with a score of 100% but that score is reduced if any component has registered a warning, error or critical status.
To learn more about it, see our blog post all about the new Business Process event monitor and how it works.
Our default templates for sending e-mail alerts were looking a bit tired so we added new versions that sport a more modern look and feel. Not only that, they now make better use of color so you can quickly identify the severity of the alert.
With SNMP some important data is stored in structures called SNMP tables. A table is a list of related items that match up one to one. For example, any SNMP-enabled device that has one or more network interfaces will have tables with the interface names, their statuses, speeds and traffic levels.
Many of our event monitors, like our bandwidth and interface status monitors, have built-in abilities to get data from SNMP tables. With 2019.3 we have introduced a new SNMP Table event monitor that lets you get data from any SNMP table, set thresholds and get alerts based on multiple table values.
We've also enhanced our regular SNMP event monitor by giving it syntax options for table support. For more details, first upgrade to v2019.3 and then see the tips on the settings tab of the event monitors or the corresponding help sections.
For more about what's new in v2019.3, see our change log. It has a complete list of what's new and improved. As always, if you have questions or feedback that you would like to share, get in touch because we're always eager to hear your suggestions.
Sincerely,
The FrameFlow Support Team
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