Device Discovery Enhancements and more in v16.19.00

Update Overview

At Device42, we believe that visibility into your IT applications and infrastructure is a powerful tool to help you manage change and improve service delivery. This release brings two major enhancements to the platform to drive better discovery and improve application management. This new release will make it easier to clarify infrastructure that was not discovered by Device42, and also brings improvements to the metadata and visualization of Business Applications that will make them more powerful when managing complex applications. We’ve also added some features to improve the general usability and flexibility of the product by making it easier to find assets and new API capabilities.

Device Subtype Enhancements

In v16.19.00, devices found by autodiscovery that have hardware models are now presented in Device42 as physical devices (previously these devices were sometimes presented as ‘unknown’ or ‘other’). “Other” type devices will now also be identified as physical, with the “other” device subtypes now being physical device subtypes. Previously any previously undiscovered hardware would come in as ‘unknown’ device types until defined by the user. This caused customers to have to define the hardware type or deal with seeing all of their physical servers called unknown. Physical, blade and other devices were all in-fact physical. Merging ‘other’ into physical will allow better and more accurate organizing of devices.

Users can also easily change the device type for devices. Device42 presents an alert of potential change conflicts when a user chooses to change the type of a device.

Enhanced Business Applications Fields and Visualization

We’ve expanded Business Applications to allow users to add critical business context to them with the addition of several new fields and the ability to create custom fields on business applications as well. The new fields allow you to specify application owners, disaster recovery objectives, compliance requirements and also group Business Applications into move groups to affect migration efforts. These new fields are also now present in the Business Application visualizations, and you can also use them to filter the Business Applications list page. In addition, you can now use the Device42 API to add custom fields to Business Applications.

Lookup Field Improvements

Our lookup fields have been enhanced in 16.19 allowing you to search for and assign values without ever leaving the page you’re on. Previously we had a pop-up dialog that allowed you to select values from a new list page. Starting in v16.19.00, you can search for values directly in the lookup fields and quickly set them as needed. For instance, you can now search for new secrets and add them without having to use the pop-up dialog by searching via the username and selecting the appropriate credentials.

Updated Imports/Exports Spreadsheet Page

The Device42 Tools > Imports/Exports (xls) page has been reorganized to list the available spreadsheets by category first rather than CRUD functionality, making it much easier to find the sheet you’re looking for. The list also now separates out sheets that will be deprecated soon in favor of newer versions in a Legacy Imports section.

Product Guides and Feature Previews

In a previous version we added functionality to collect product usage data and allow us to provide guides within the product.

With the release of version 16.19.0, a Resource Center and guides for the Device Type and Business Application updates will be available for users that opt in to Allow Guided Product Tours.

For those that also enable the Guided Tours, you can look forward to future feature previews being added to assist users in the use of new features or changes, as well as guides to help onboard users in product usage.

Enabling Guided Tours is done from the Device42 Appliance Manager and can be found in Global Settings > Misc. Settings.

Bug Fixes

An issue in which SNMP autodiscovery of Liebert CRAC devices was sometimes returning incorrect hardware information has been resolved.
An issue in which Auto Clean rules configured for ‘Other’ device types in previous versions were sometimes not working correctly in v16.19.00 has been resolved.
An issue in which a successful API call to update custom fields for certificates was returning an incorrect response code has been resolved.
An issue in which bulk import for Purchases was not correctly updating the Purchases Notes field has been resolved.
An issue in which the Device API was not able to update a blade device using the blade slot number has been resolved.
An issue in which scheduled auto-discovery jobs were not running as scheduled and could not be run manually has been resolved.
Column headers in the View Business Applications page are now consistent with the column headers on other UI view pages.