Device42 Gets a New Look in Milestone Release v15

We’re extremely excited to announce the milestone release of Device42 v15.00.00, featuring a fully revamped UI with an attractive and fresh new look, a brand-new reporting engine, a completely re-authored alerting engine, and a new underlying operating system to power it all!

Completely Re-Envisioned UI!

It’s here! Device42 v15 has a brand new UI! We’re always listening to your requests, and this one has been in the back of our minds for a while now. While we’ve known for a long time that we were #1 in features, we knew we had room for improvement in the looks department, and with v15, that’s just what we’ve done!

Here’s a quick video tour of the new UI:

Device42 v15 is as good looking as it is powerful, and we’re pretty sure you’ll love it as much as we do! The new UI will do most of the talking for itself, but here are a few of the major UI highlights:

Menu Changes

The “Discovery” menu is now at the top level
The “IPAM” menu has been rebranded “Network”
Passwords have been rebranded as “Secrets” to reflect the full breadth of their functionality
The menu itself has been condensed into the headers to minimize its footprint, while select menu items have become icons:
- The home page “bookmark” is now an easy-to-use “Home Icon” (upper left):
- “Help” and “Bookmarks” menus have both also become icons, along with the search bar, which is hidden until clicked (upper right):

All new search screens feature condensed lists and headers for a less cluttered and enhanced view of any data you may search for:

Select physical device to view v15

The UI now follows a theme of overall minimalism, keeping focus on the data that matters to you most:

View device hardware model

The Device42 Appliance

Device42’s virtual appliance is now CentOS powered! Previously powered by Ubuntu, we’ve realized that the update schedule for CentOS better fits the needs of our customers, offering an overall more stable, and more predictable update schedule. CentOS also features a lighter-weight image, meaning a faster download, helping to keep the Device42 appliance fast and lean.

For the record, updating to v15 will require a backup and restore due to the underlying architecture change. Follow the instructions in the “Updating to v15” section below, and if you need help, don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected]. For good measure, keep your old appliance around for a bit while you get used to the new one and ensure everything made it over, and it’s not a bad idea to hang on to your backup file, too! Though not as simple as our normal update process, this is a one-time requirement, and we’re sure you’ll agree it’s worth it. We’d love your feedback!

New Reporting Engine

We have introduced an entirely new reporting engine in v15 that greatly improves how you can view and leverage your data. Not only are the new reports rich and beautiful, but reports in v15 are also more powerful and more flexible than ever, and it’s never been easier to extract business intelligence from your infrastructure data. Reports can now include interactive graphics like pie charts, for example, that reveal details on mouseover, and much, much more! The new reporting platform comes packaged with an easy-to-use report designer so that you can get exactly the data you want, while easily making it look great, too!

V15 also provides a wide selection of sample reports to get you started, while a new menu item Reports > Advanced Reporting has been added to allow you to create and customized reports in D42.

Jira7 RunDeck new reporting engine report

You can, of course, also schedule reports to run as well as be delivered directly to your inbox via email:

Advanced reporting and dashboards screen

New Alerting Engine

Last, but by no means least, v15 also features a completely re-written alerting engine! The new engine adds a great degree of flexibility and customizability to both the alerts, and the alert emails themselves. You can now go beyond simply customizing the alert criteria by choosing from a wide selection of variables to embed within the alert emails themselves. This provides a much richer, more descriptive alert ensuring you get all the information you need right from the alert itself, no matter where you are!

With an unlimited number of alert email destinations, fully customizable escalation steps and timings, and the new embedded variables, you’ll never wonder if an alert really requires your immediate attention again! See the sample of an alert email with populated alert variables above!

Getting the new Device42 v15

As mentioned above, the D42 main appliance now runs on CentOS 7. This major change requires the download and setup of a new appliance image. You will be able to easily migrate your current data by utilizing a database backup from your v14.17 appliance and restoring it to v15 (get v14.17 on the update page). See the following article on our support site for instructions on updating to v15!

Please keep in mind that this upgrade only works with the base v15 image, so do not apply any further upgrades until you have migrated your data!

Get v15 on the Device42 download page – Fill out the form to download! Kindly note that v15 is currently only available as a VMware .vmdk; Citrix Xen and Hyper-V images will follow shortly!

Of course, as mentioned above, don’t hesitate to reach out to [email protected] if you need a hand with the upgrade, or if you have any questions. As always, and especially with such a milestone release, we’d also love an email with your feedback just the same! Please let us know what you think, good, great, or otherwise — it’s extremely helpful to us to hear it!