Cloud Recommendation, Reporting, and Discovery Enhancements in v16.02.01

We are excited to announce the general availability of Device42 v16.02.01, which includes the following:

Cloud Recommendation Engine enhancements

This release includes enhancements to the Cloud Recommendation Engine that will better account for different CPU configurations, speeds, and current utilization. With these new changes you should find that the Cloud Recommendation Engine will provide the best possible match based on the data Device42 has collected and monitored.

Advanced Reporting updates

In this version, the Advanced Reporting framework was updated to take advantage of some significant performance improvements (and bug fixes) available in the latest release. In addition, several of the pre-built advanced reports were also updated, while various data elements were expanded for existing reports.

New reports are as follows:

Discovery_Status_by_Device: Detailed discovery status for easier troubleshooting
Discovery_Status_by_Job: Detailed job status for increased discovery visibility
Load_Balancers: Shows VIPs, Pools, Member Server and Service relationship
System_Profiles_Summary: Overview of discovered systems by count

Have an idea for a report, or a suggestion? Drop a note to [email protected] with your idea!

Discovery enhancements

SNMP discovery performance improvements

Device42 v16.02.01 includes SNMP discovery enhancements that should significantly boost discovery performance against large IP ranges. These improvements allot more resources to the port check portion of the discovery, which in the past could take significant time to run against larger network segments.

Port check can now take advantage of all resources available to the discovery appliance. Internal testing showed that these enhancements resulted in both a net reduction in retries and a drastic performance improvement.

We’re looking forward to hearing about your results, as well!

SNMP support for IBM tape libraries

This release also adds support for IBM tape library discovery via SNMP.

Oracle OVM cluster support

The v16.02.01 release of Device42 also introduces Oracle Virtualization Manger (aka OVM) discovery support. Create and schedule a new OVM discovery job from the Device42 main menu, Discovery → Hypervisor/*nix/Windows, then simply select “Oracle OVM” as your platform to begin retrieving and storing cluster information from devices running OVM.

Simply browse to your OVM host’s device detail page and open the “Virtuals” tab to see the names of discovered virtual machines that are part of the cluster:

Oracle OVM cluster discovery example

Redfish discovery – Serial number options

v16.02.01 introduces a new option to retrieve serial numbers during Redfish discovery. You can now simply select Service Tag as your option for Serial To Use when defining a discovery job to utilize this new value. The new option can be previewed in the screenshot to the right.

New zone support for Google Cloud discovery

Google Cloud discovery jobs now include support for all recently added regions in Google Cloud platform.

DOQL, API, and other updates

Custom field APIs

The custom fields APIs (e.g. /api/1.0/custom_fields/building/ as an example) were enhanced and now support adding items to picklist (drop-down) custom fields via the newly added parameter add_to_picklist.

This new parameter expects a comma separated list of picklist items to add. Note that existing pick list items will be ignored, however, so if in doubt, all list values can be re-sent when updating as opposed to only new items. Duplicates are filtered automatically.

Last login DOQL access

v16.01.00 introduced Last login functionality to Windows discovery jobs, and this release follows up with the necessary DOQL view to support this new data: view_devicelastlogin_v1. With this addition, last login details can now be included in reports, and of course accessed directly via DOQL.

Periodic jobs DOQL access

This release also adds the ‘Periodic jobs’ data that is currently visible in Reports > Periodic Jobs to DOQL, as well, to the newly added view_periodicjob_v1 view. In addition, you can include this data in reports via Advanced Reporting.

LDAP connection timeout control

A new configuration option to customize the LDAP connection timeout has been added. The default is 10 seconds, and can of course be customized based on what makes sense for your specific network environment. Find the setting in the Device42 main menu, Settings → LDAP.

Bug fixes

Sample hardware model import file would error when re-imported. Fixed.
Switch VLAN ports were inversely related to parent physical ports. Fixed.
IP addresses on VLAN ports were being assigned to the physical port rather than VLAN port. Fixed.
Standby appliances were incorrectly requiring license re-registration after restoration of a backup. Fixed.
Adding a new Asset Tag profile could fail if the asset ‘Start Number’ was >32,767. Fixed.