Systems Health Map: Usability improvements and additional functionality

The Systems Health Map in this release has a lot of improvements for easier usage and quicker insight to potential issues in your environment:

• additional presentations of alert rule results: by platform, by severity, by system category or by user category
• possibility to limit the Systems Health Map to selected systems only
• possibility to exclude multiple alert rule results at once and optionally add comments
• copy the contents of the alert rule result table to clipboard for easy import into Excel or other tools
• save timeframe- and autoplay-setting across sessions

Each alert rule result can be analyzed by a only a few clicks. Expert knowledge and the BVQ GUI are not necessarily required to find the root cause of a problem.
It's as simple as that:

1. Select the alert rule of interest from the Systems Health Map
2. Select the object which should be investigated further

Now you can find all information about this object:

1. Summary - Why and when did this object change its status?
2. Topology changes - Which attribute has changed in the selected timeframe and possibly led to the object change? Additional attributes can be added to or removed from the table.
3. Performance - What was the performance of the selected object at the time of the incident? Additional metrics can be added to the chart or new charts added. Use the "Go to incident"-button to cover the time of the latest state change in your chart.

Alerting: Usability improvements and additional functionality

Configuration, creation and usage of alert rules in BVQ has also been improved in this release.

Predefined alert rules now have a clone function. The rule will now be opened in the advanced editor for further modification:

Alert conditions in an alert rule created with the advanced editor can be cloned as well:

The Categories-tab provides additional functionality:

• Click on any user or system category to see which rules are part of it. 

• Click on "Rule assignment" to add rules to a category or to remove rules from it.

Generic SAN model

BVQ supports two different Fibre Channel Switch vendors - Brocade and Cisco. And for Brocade SANs, there are two ways of collecting the data - via Brocade Network Advisor (BNA) or REST API directly from the FC switches. This makes three different platforms and object models in total.

In this version of BVQ, a generic SAN model has been introduced which combines all three BVQ platforms into one. 

The following table shows all object types which are available as generic SAN object types and their translations into the specific platforms.

Further Enhancements

WebUI tables improvements

Several usability improvements are part of this release:

• Every table in the WebUI has a search box
• Alert rules are hyperlinks. Clicking on an alert rule name opens the result details for that rule
• Everwhere in the WebUI alert rules display their configuration details. Hover over the question mark to see all information for the selected alert rule

SVC Host cluster support

A host cluster is a group of logical host objects that can be managed together. Volumes mapped to a host cluster are shared by every host in this cluster. This feature, released in SVC version 7.7.1, is now available in BVQ as well. We have introduced a new object type called "SVC Host cluster".