OP5 Monitor update – December

I am very happy to start this newsletter with the announcement that OP5 Monitor 9 is now officially in the open beta stage. It has been a lot of work to get to this point and during the beta stage we will make the final polish. In version 9 the OP5 Monitor has been updated to work with newer version of components such as PHP, MariaDB and RabbitMQ. Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 8 will be the baseline, but we also intend to test version 9 on CentOS Stream 8 and Rocky Linux 8. The set of plugins has been reviewed and reduced to improve quality. The plugins now being shipped are the once most frequently used and these are now up to date and well documented. As usual it is still possible to install any of the 4000 plugins available in the community. During the beta stage we will employ what is called rolling releases i.e., with a new release whenever there is an update available. There is a  separate release notes page for the beta to learn more and how you can try it out and provide feedback to us. We are aiming to have the first general release of version 9 in Q1 2022. 
 
Late September this fall ITRS hosted a successful and well attended OP5 Monitor user event where the new UI was demonstrated. We got a lot of positive feedback. Make sure that you opt-in to our newsletters so that you do not miss announcements of future events. The work continues around the next phase which is presenting data from dynamic environments in the new UI. The new UI and the existing UI will live side by side for a while but the improved support for dynamic environments and other new functionality will only be available in the new UI. A beta of the new UI is planned to be available during spring 2022. 
 
Security continues to be a top priority and since last newsletter we have tightened the security around our repositories. GPG signature checks in the OP5 Monitor repositories metadata are performed by default when installing or upgrading the OP5 Monitor packages. HTTPS has also been enabled in the OP5 Monitor package repositories and is now enabled by default in the yum configuration files. With the new operating system support in version 9 we get up to date frameworks and modules. 
 
In an effort to promote accessibility and transparency between customers and ITRS, we are launching a community forum. In this forum there will also be a dedicated section around OP5 Monitor and I would like to encourage you to look into it and help us making this a valuable resource for the OP5 Monitor community. 
 
Finally, a reminder that Logger has been removed with the release of OP5 Monitor version 9. If you are looking for an alternative log management solution, ITRS portfolio includes Log Analytics which is a very competent solution based on Elastic. There is also an integration between OP5 Monitor and Log Analytics available out of the box.
 
With that I wrap up for this time, stay safe! Goodbye for now.