OP5 Monitor June update
Welcome to the second ITRS newsletter of 2020. This quarter has been unusual for all of us. Most of the workforce is now working from home, placing increased demand on IT estate monitoring on two fronts. First, an increased dependence on technology, particularly off-premise technology, has created unprecedented levels of traffic, straining IT capacity. Second, the shift in working hours, with many now working earlier in the morning or into the night, means services must be up-and-running 24/7 and cannot abide downtime outside of the regular 9 to 5.
On top of pressures brought on by the present crisis, the modern estate is more complex than ever before; a jigsaw puzzle of on-premise and cloud-based services. We call this co-existence Hybrid-IT and it is fundamental to our vision for OP5 Monitor, which provides firms with a much-needed centralized view of their entire IT estate. Under this banner, the latest version of OP5 Monitor focuses on three key features: security, customer interface and documentation.
On the security front, we have worked to integrate improved security practices and mitigate risk at every stage of the product. For example, we have introduced an application firewall, ModSecurity. to prevent security risks and block potentially harmful behaviours in the application. We also continuously run security scans on all the components of OP5 Monitor so that we can get early notifications of potential security risks. At the same time, we monitor the community closely and keep our core components in sync with upstream.
To improve the customer experience of our OP5 Monitor interface, we have invested resources in developing a new UI and supporting API, all designed around our Hybrid-IT vision. The new UI is modern and measured, both in appearance and in framework. One of the features is the introduction of dark mode, which can increase the vibrancy of foreground content. We’ll be sharing more on this in our next update.
Improving the documentation of OP5 Monitor has also been a key focus for us. Over the last few months, we introduced versioning on the documentation. When selecting a specific minor version, the documentation will now update accordingly. We have also created a compatibility matrix to act as a search engine for those who need to quickly find answers about supported versions of operating systems, browsers, agents, applications, end of life dates and much more. The third improvement we are doing around the documentation is creating a separate "What's New" section where we have collected an overview of the latest and greatest features.
End of life announcements:
- The EoL of RHEL/CentOS version 6: Redhat will end of life RHEL/CentOS 6 on the 30th of November this year and as a result we are doing the same. If you have any version of OP5 Monitor running on CentOS 6 we encourage you plan for an update to version 7 well before this due date.
- The EoL date of the Mobile Application: We needed to end of life this with immediate effect in April since it was removed from application stores. There are alternatives out there that still support OP5 Monitor if you need it.
Stay safe.
