OP5 Monitor update - June
Welcome to the second OP5 Monitor newsletter in 2021. I hope we share the same optimism now that things are finally looking better, society is opening up more and life is slowly returning to normal.
We continue to put a lot of our effort into the new UI and improvements to the supporting backend. We have come so far at this time that we are planning for an internal release before the summer holidays and aiming for a first external release during the autumn. The new UI and the existing UI will live side by side for a while, but the improved support for metrics and other new functionality will only be available in the new UI. I know many of you are really looking forward to the new UI, so we have created a blog post for you where we discuss the UI in more detail. Check it out!
We are working for base line support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 8 (RHEL). The plan is to have this support by mid-autumn. With the upcoming end of life of CentOS version 8, we see that the drop-in replacements Rocky Linux and Alma Linux have released their first versions. Our plan is to test OP5 Monitor on a number of these CentOS replacements besides RHEL 8. More details on which version it will be tested on will come closer to the release.
Security hardening of OP5 Monitor is another important initiative, and in the interest of increasing security and minimizing the risk for both ITRS and our customers, a preventive decision was made to not include the operating system (OS) itself in our downloads. With this change, we mitigate cybersecurity risks, by reducing the potential exposure to OS vulnerabilities. This change has already been implemented since the end of April.
There has surfaced news that a number of CVEs have been used to compromise Nagios installations – read more about it here. We have been looking into each one of these CVEs and verified that OP5 Monitor is not affected by the attack described.
In the area of Hybrid IT and especially around dynamic environments, we have made great progress in the use-case of OP5 Monitor running natively in dynamic environments. Slim Poller, our small footprint container with poller functionality, had a big update in version 8.3. In this version we added native support for Kubernets auto-scaling. This means that the process of spinning up new or tearing down existing Slim Pollers is fully automated and governed by Kubernetes and the rules set in the manifesto. The Slim Poller can also be set up automatically with environment variables, and can auto-register with the cluster. We have also changed the name of our AWS plugin to check_aws and at the same time added support for a number of new regions.
Finally, I would like to remind you of some recent and upcoming dates relating to OP5 Monitor support:
- End of availability of OP5 Monitor supplied with OS components (ISO/OVA) the 28:th of April 2021.
- End of Life of OP5 Monitor version 8.1.x the 13:th of April 2021.
- End of Life of OP5 Monitor version 7.5.x the 13:th of October 2021.
- End of Life of CentOS version 8 the 31:th of December 2021.
With that, I wrap up for this time, stay safe and have a good summer! Goodbye for now.
