We're thrilled to announce the latest enhancements in Centreon software with the release of version 24.04. As always, we are committed to providing our users with an evolving platform that meets the demands of modern IT monitoring, and this update is no exception.
Announcing the General Availability of New Centreon Dashboards
Teams operating complex, distributed infrastructures need customized dashboards that instantly show the health and performance of the IT domain they are responsible for.
After a successful Beta program, the new Centreon Dashboards functionality is now Generally Available! Say goodbye to the old Custom Views and hello to:
- A sleek user interface designed for intuitive navigation
- Enhanced customization capabilities for tailored dashboards
- Responsive design support, ensuring optimal display on all devices
- Simplified dashboard and widget creation, making setup a breeze
- Improved user right management, providing granular control
- Easy-to-use tools for sharing dashboards with team members
This marks a new era of flexibility and user experience in your IT monitoring activities with Centreon. User who tried the Beta version highlighted two key improvements when compared to Custom Views: the flexible widget positioning and sizing (no more limit to one, two or three columns!) and the ease of selecting resources and metrics when configuring a widget. Try it for yourself and enjoy a whole new user experience!
Please note: for the time being, Centreon Dashboards will coexist with Custom Views. We have no plan to deprecate Custom Views anytime soon.
Our R&D effort will now focus on extending the functionalities of Centreon Dashboards and adding more widgets to the existing list:
- Generic Text
- Group Monitoring
- MAP view
- Metrics Graph
- Resource Table
- Single Metric
- Status Chart
- Status Grid
- Top / Bottom List
Thanks to all contributors to the Beta program who provided feedback on dataset selection, data visualization, saving options and responsive design considerations to help us achieve the General Availability status. The dedicated group on The Watch has now been closed.
User Interface Improvements: Resource Status, MAP
Resource Status is a key user interface in Centreon that not only displays the list of assets in Warning and Critical status, but most importantly helps to identify what’s going wrong, find the root cause of the problem, understand its impact, and take action.
While 23.10 saw major additions, with a choice of three alternative views (All Resources, Hosts, Services), 24.04 continues to add multiple improvements to boost productivity, all based on your feedback. In particular, new dedicated action buttons have been added to the Detail Panel to directly acknowledge a problem, set a downtime or re-schedule a check. And it is now possible to add a comment directly from the Resource Timeline panel.
MAP underwent a major refresh a couple of years ago, where maps can be fully created and edited from the web user interface: no more desktop client to install. While this raised the usability of the functionality and eased the design and configuration of maps, it also came with some frustration from users who migrated from the legacy version, highlighting some differences and (let’s be honest) a few glitches with the new tool.
24.04 includes more that 40 small enhancements and bug fixes to make the user interface a much more robust one, also optimizing performance for platforms with thousands of maps configured.
Please note: all bug fixes have also been backported to 23.04 and 23.10 minor releases.
And also: due to popular demand, the fullscreen mode at the application level is available again!
Configuration APIs: more Rest API endpoints, application-based token
Our goal hasn’t changed: fully replace CLAPI and API v1 with a comprehensive set of Rest APIs to seamlessly integrate Centreon in the most modern and demanding IT Automation workflow.
To that avail, 24.04 adds the following endpoints to our Rest API:
- Host: PATCH
- Service: PATCH
- Media: GET LIST
- Business Activity: GET, DELETE
- Cloud Token: UPDATE
- Graph Template: GET
- Connectors: GET
- Severities: PUT
- Broker output: POST (including fileformat)
Automation usually implements workflows from ITSM or IT Automation tools for the configuration and deployment of monitoring. These machine-to-machine API calls can now use an application-based token to avoid the login phase.
24.04 adds a user interface to generate and manage application tokens, as well as endpoints to make use of them. Each token is associated with a Centreon user to impersonate its ACL privileges. Each token lifecycle (expiration date, revoking a token) can be managed independently.
As an example of a typical use-case, these tokens make it possible to use webhooks in your CMDB so that Centreon configuration is triggered as soon as the CMDB is populated by some IT Automation tool, or as soon as it changes to “in production” status..
Security enforcement: custom command whitelist
Organizations around the world turn to Centreon for always-on operations and performance excellence. Centreon is committed to the security of the data they rely on and is continuously improving policies, processes, and products to meet the highest standards.
24.04 introduces a new mechanism to limit the type commands that can be executed on a Centreon Poller. This is to prevent a person that would have got fraudulent access to a central server to configure malicious commands to be executed on a remote poller.
If this feature is turned on, 24.04 pollers forbid all commands to be executed, unless they are explicitly included in a new set of custom command whitelists, one whitelist for centreon engine execution, a second one for centreon gorgone execution. A dedicated set of whitelists can be configured for each poller.
By default, on a Centreon On-Premises platform, this feature is turned off for centreon engine and turned on for centreon gorgone, with a relevant default whitelist. The feature is turned on for both for Centreon Cloud customers.
Canopsis Stream Connector
Stream Connectors are designed to integrate Centreon with your IT Operations environment by sending qualified, formatted, filtered events and/or metrics to third-party platforms.
24.04 adds a new version of the Stream Connector to integrate Centreon with the Canopsis open source platform. Canopsis is used by IT Organizations to centralize, transform and present events from multiple monitoring tools into a single view.
Canopsis is developed and maintained by Capensis. This Stream Connector is developed, maintained and documented by Centreon, with the help of Capensis team. It integrates with the latest v4 Canopsis API and is compatible with Canopsis 22.10 or later.
Please note: the two previous versions of the connector are now deprecated.
Monthly Monitoring Connectors Release
New or updated Monitoring Connectors are released every month. They are independent from the Centreon software version and are not reported here. Subscribe to the Product Updates section of The Watch to the monthly monitoring connectors releases bulletin.
Centreon Platform: Debian 12, MariaDB 10.11, MySQL 8 support
Each new software version comes with a list of supported operating systems or software components.
- 24.04 adds the support of Debian 12 to the list of supported operating systems (Debian 11, RHEL/Oracle/Alma Linux 9, RHEL/Oracle/Alma Linux 8).
- 24.04 requires an upgrade to MariaDB 10.11, which is their latest LTS version.
- Alternatively, 24.04 also officially supports MySQL 8.0.
Check the compatibility section of the online documentation to keep track of all component compatibility. Follow the update section of the same documentation when updating your Centreon platform to 24.04.
What’s next?
- If you are a Centreon Cloud user, your service platform is on a continuous delivery plan and is already up to date, no action is required.
- Centreon On-Premises platforms, both open source or commercial editions, can be updated to 24.04 using the standard procedures.
- If you’re running 22.04 or earlier versions of Centreon, please beware that these versions are not supported anymore. In particular, no security patches are delivered anymore on these versions.
- Read the online documentation for update, upgrade and migration procedures, or for more detailed release notes.
- Contact us to request help from our Professional Services team if you don’t feel confident upgrading or migrating your commercial on-premises Centreon platform.
- Watch out for the replay (french version / english version) of the webinar that was held on Thursday 25 April 2024, for a demo of all new features and Questions & Answers session with the Product Managers.
Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the Product Updates section to be informed in real time about security bulletins, minor updates and monthly monitoring connector releases.
New to Centreon? Take the Product Tour or Ask for a demo to see if the Centreon platform is for you.
And if you want the French version of this blogpost, click here.