Support for Cisco MDS Switches

Horizontal Marker

Charts in BVQ rely on user interpretation in most situations. To support the user to save and visualize general or custom thresholds "Horizontal Marker" has been introduced in the BVQ GUI.

Key Features 

• Stored with the favorite
• Dynamic visibility
• Available for performance and all chartable attributes

To create a marker open a chart and go to the new "Marker Tab". Use the Buttons to add, edit or delete markers.

Visibility Conditions 

To control the visibility of a marker there are 4 conditions which have to keept in mind.

1. The drawing options are extended with a global "Marker" checkbox. If unchecked no marker will be displayed for this favorite and ignore all other conditions 
   
2. A marker will only be shown if the appropriate metric is visible
3. A marker will only be shown if the "Visible" checkbox is checked
4. A marker might be invisible if it is scaled out. Due to the Auto-Adjust Feature it might happen that a 90% Marker is invisible if the max chart value is 40%.

VMware: Additional attributes 

With version 6.1 we added many additional attributes to the VMware objects Cluster, Host, Virtual Machine and SCSI Volume. Therefor we updated the related table views and made the attributes available for Alerting and charting in the GUI, Reports and Grafana.

New attributes:

New license model 

With version 6.1 we introduced a new license model. To simplify the usage new licenses wouldn't need specific system id's any more. This will reduce the cases to create a new license because of id changes in your environment.

More detailed license information are available here: https://bvq.atlassian.net/wiki/x/ogjT 

The license changes are reflected in the BVQ WebUI as well and will provide a better overview.

WebUI: BVQ support package

BVQ stores various log files in different locations. All those log files can now be easily collected in one single package. Once provided to the BVQ support team, they can now isolate and fix a potential problem more quickly.

To collect a support package, go to Support > Support package. Select from two types of support packages:

Logs Package

• Scanner logs of each scanner instance
• All scanner configurations
• BVQ-Server logs
• File count report. How many files are in each folder of bvq-server\data

Logs, Topology and Performance Package

• Latest 5 topology files of each scanner instance (error, invalid, done, etc.)
• Latest 5 performance files of each scanner instance (error, invalid, done, etc.)
• Latest 5 event files of each scanner instance (error, invalid, done, etc.)
• Scanner logs of each scanner instance
• All scanner configurations
• BVQ-Server logs
• File count report. How many files are in each folder of bvq-server\data

WebUI: Reporting Improvements

In former BVQ releases, topology tables or performance charts could only be used in report templates if the views were previously created in the Expert GUI and stored as favorites in the All-users folder. This was a complex and complicated procedure.

With BVQ 6.1, topology tables and performance charts are now available as report template snippets which makes their usage much easier.

The new snippets can be found here:

Further Enhancements

Export GUI: Ease expansion of objects in tree mode tables

Expanding objects in a tree mode table can require a lot of clicks if the amount of objects is high. To make navigation through different object levels easier, each object type in the path can now be expanded/collapsed separately. Just right-click on the table header and select the required object type to expand up or collapse down to this level.

WebUI: BVQ GUI downloadable from server

To avoid DB schema level mismatches, it is recommended to use a GUI version that matches the BVQ Server version. In the past, the only resource to download the GUI was this Wiki here. While this option still exists, it is now also possible to download the GUI directly from the login screen of the BVQ Server.

WebUI: Add possibility to disable performance scan for SAN and SVC scanners

By default, performance data collection for SVC, Brocade and Cisco scanners is enabled. Just like VMware scanners, an option has been added to those other scanner types to make collection of performance data configurable.

WebUI: Individual data expiration definitions

By default, performance indicators and alert rule results are being deleted from MongoDB after a certain timeframe. Those default values are the following:

• raw performance data: 31 days
• 5-minute-interval performance data: 91 days
• 1-hour-interval performance data: 365 days
• 1-day-interval performance data: 730 days
• alert rule results: 28 days

Depending on the number and type of scanned systems in BVQ, the size of the database can increase quite quickly. In addition, data from different systems might be of more or less importance so the above default values are not suitable for all systems.

As a result, the expiration dates in BVQ are now configurable on a per system basis.

There are two ways of adjusting the expiration dates in the WebUI:

1. Go to Scanner and edit the required scanner configuration. At the bottom of the dialogue, enter the new expiration dates for the selected system:
   
2. Go to Administration > Data Expiration. Each system scanned by BVQ is listed here. Use the Edit-Button to open the scanner-configuration dialogue and adjust the expiration dates for this particular system. To adjust the default values so that expiration dates change for all scanned systems, click on Edit default expiration dates on the upper right corner of the page.

WebUI: Ease identification of Scanner problems

If a BVQ configuration contains a lot of scanner instances, it was often difficult to find out if all scanners were working properly or if there were any issues. To make identification of erroneous scanners easier, they are duplicated on top of the scanner overview page under "Critical configurations".

WebUI: Exclusion/Re-inclusion of alert rule ojects

Alert rules help to monitor the health of the monitored systems. As long as all objects have a good status, everything's fine. Objects in warning or error state are often cause for worry and indicate a more or less critical issue. But there can be circumstances where an object is known to be in error state, e.g. a hardware part is known to be broken but won't be repaired within the next days. In this case, it is annoying that the Systems Health Map shows a bad result although the reason is understood and a solution underway. Those objects are then typically excluded from the view. Inclusion of the object was a manual process which means that the excluded object never shows up again in this particular alert rule if you forgot to include it manually.

To avoid this from happening, more options to automatically reinclude an object after inclusion have been added to the exclusion-dialogue:

• Go to Alerting > Results, select the alert rule of interest and click on the eye-icon next to the required object:
  
• the exclude/include-dialogue offers different methods to auto-include the object:
  
  
  • select "Manually" to re-include the object individually (default option)
  • select "At next Alert rule run after" and enter date and time. In this case, the object is auto-included once this alert rule is executed the first time after this date. Be aware that - dependent on the execution frequency of the rule - the inclusion of the object is much later than the defined date and time!
  • select "At next transition to default Alert level" to auto-include the object the next time it changes to default level. Default level typically is the OK-state unless the user has defined a different default level.
  • select "At next transition to Alert level" and enter the alert level to auto-include the object the next time it changes to this level.

WebUI: Show license status on Home dashboard

For easier determination of a license issue, the license status is now visible on the BVQ WebUI Home dashboard. Once logged it, the status is shown in the upper right corner of the dashboard. A click into the box takes you directly to Administration > License where you can see all details of the license and identify potential license issues quickly.