We’re excited to share the news about the release of Centreon version 24.10, packed with new improvements and features. As part of our ongoing commitment to delivering a cutting-edge IT & OT monitoring platform, this update continues to address the growing needs of our users and keeps pace with the ever-evolving landscape of modern technology.
This software version is of particular importance to us since it initiates the new Release Cadence and Version Lifecycle policy we announced earlier this year.
Centreon 24.10 brings new capabilities to your IT & OT monitoring platform with a new Centreon Monitoring Agent, native OpenTelemetry support, added flexibility with Centreon Dashboards, and a host of other enhancements.
24.10 Long Term Support: starting a new release cadence and version lifecycle
In June this year, we announced the new Release Cadence and Version Lifecycle of our Self-Hosted Centreon IT Monitoring software platform.
In a nutshell, starting with this 24.10 version, Centreon will now release one major version every year, in October, instead of every six months. This applies to all Open Source and Commercial editions.
Also starting with this 24.10 version, Commercial major versions released on even years will now be supported for 3 years and called Long Term Support (LTS), whilst versions released on odd years will be supported for 18 months. Centreon Open Source versions will be supported for 18 months.
Note: users of the SaaS version of Centreon, called Centreon Cloud, are not impacted by the changes described here. The Centreon Cloud environment adopts a continuous delivery policy and its software version is always up to date.
Read this blog post to get the full details of the announcement and better understand whether you should plan upgrading your platform to Centreon 24.10, or watch this video:
New Centreon Monitoring Agent, replacing NRPE and NSClient++
While Centreon is primarily an agentless platform that can monitor an incredible variety of IT & OT environments where installing an agent would not be possible, there are some situations where deploying an agent is convenient and efficient: typically when monitoring a large number of Linux or Windows servers.
To avoid relying on third party agents that are no longer supported, Centreon introduces its own open source monitoring software agent, simply called the Centreon Monitoring Agent (CMA). The Centreon Monitoring Agent collects metrics and computes statuses on the Host where it resides, and sends them to Centreon. Centreon plugins as well as Nagios compatible plugins can be used with this agent.
The Centreon Monitoring Agent is a program that has been available in beta status for a few months now and is still undergoing continuous updates and improvements. The general availability status will be reached in a 24.10.x minor release by the end of the year.
With 24.10.0, you may already start monitoring your servers with this new agent:
- Two dedicated Monitoring Connectors are readily available: Linux Centreon Monitoring Agent and Windows Centreon Monitoring Agent (native checks will be added soon, for better performance)
- A Windows installer is available, supporting both a user Iinterface and silent mode (for massive deployment).
- Poller/Agent communications support optional flow encryption and poller-initiated connection to comply with security policies.
You may join the community in this dedicated group, and get all the information you need to install the agent, configure the poller, understand the roadmap and strategy, ask your questions, and share your inputs.
OpenTelemetry native support, for greater insights
As IT monitoring advances toward observability, it now supports the collection of flexible, diverse, and often raw data. This evolution empowers teams to investigate unanticipated issues in complex environments. A new standard is emerging to facilitate observability: OpenTelemetry, or OTel. This open-source framework enables the collection and routing of metrics, logs, and traces to enrich monitoring.
Centreon 24.10 supports OpenTelemetry and allows the collection of metrics from any standard OTel agent, starting with Telegraf, developed by InfluxDB. After a successful beta phase, this functionality will continue to evolve in the upcoming 24.10.x minor releases, enabling data collection from any standard agent implementing the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). The OTLP specification standardizes how telemetry data is encoded, transported, and delivered across sources.
Join the discussion in The Watch’s dedicated group, where members can share experiences and insights on OTel support and the Centreon Monitoring Agent, both developed by the Centreon product team.
This commitment to OpenTelemetry is an important step in future-proofing your monitoring capabilities, and Centreon is excited to be a registered vendor within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem!
Centreon Dashboards: multiple improvements for an even greater flexibility
Centreon Dashboards is the heart of the Centreon platform, the single pane of glass where all relevant information can be organized, visualized and shared with all stakeholders.
Centreon Dashboards reached General Availability status six months ago and is a much more modern, flexible, and powerful set of functionalities than the Custom Views it replaces. This is especially true with the enhancements brought by Centreon 24.10:
- New Business Activity Diagram widget
- New Clock / Timer widget
- New Web Page widget
- Enhanced Metrics Graph widget, with additional display options
- Status Grid widget with Business Views and Business Activities visibility
- Enhanced resource filtering capabilities
- Open Ticket integration in the Resource Table widget
- Easy-to-setup playlist projection for public screens
All of these enhancements contribute to a better user experience with easier interface navigation, added flexibility when editing a dashboard, and more ways to share information across your organization.
For example, playlists are a great way to share information on large displays within your organization. A playlist is a list of dashboards that are to be displayed in a loop. With Centreon 24.10, you can now easily generate a secure public link to the playlist that just needs to be embedded or configured on connected TVs.
Centreon Dashboards also contribute to increased productivity. In particular, the Open Ticket integration makes it easy to open, manage and close incident tickets in your ITSM environment directly from the Resource Table widget:
- Typically configured with two widgets in a single dashboard: one widget to list critical alerts without assigned tickets, one widget to list alerts already assigned to an incident ticket.
- Users can open a new incident ticket directly from the widget user interface
- All contextual information is automatically transferred to the ticketing platform
- User can also close tickets directly from the widget user interface
- Supports all Centreon Open Ticket service providers including ServiceNow, GLPi, Atlassian Jira, EasyVista and many more. See all ITSM integrations in the online documentation.
Please note:
- Custom Views are not deprecated yet, and can still be used alongside Centreon Dashboards.
- The Playlist feature requires a commercial software license.
- The Business Activity Diagram widget requires a Business Edition commercial software license.
- Other enhancements to Centreon Dashboards will be added in future 24.10.x minor releases.
Centreon 24.10 Miscellaneous Enhancements
Centreon 24.10 comes with a wealth of product improvements and bug fixes in almost every area of the platform. The most important improvements are listed in this section.
Centreon Poller
Some monitoring connectors require additional configuration files to be stored on the Centreon Poller, e.g. the VMware connector.
- Centreon 24.10 adds a user interface to configure and generate additional connector configuration files, which can then be exported to the Poller(s).
- VMware 6 and VMware 7 are currently supported, more connectors will be supported later.
Other changes to the Centreon Poller include:
- gRPC API : evolution of the GetHost function to return more data.
- The command whitelist now works with all types of commands, including notifications/handlers.
- Centreon Engine now handles extra configuration files to overwrite the centengine.cfg file. This allows you to keep a custom configuration unchanged when exporting the configuration.
- A new centengine parameter has been added to force sending a recovery notification even when the resource is outside of its notification period.
Resource Status UI
Resource Status is the Centreon user interface that displays the list of resources in Warning and Critical status, helps to identify what’s going wrong, find the root cause of the problem, understand its impact, and take action.
Centreon 24.10 includes about 20 enhancements and bug fixes that improve the user experience in many areas such as search, filtering, detail panel, as well as providing complete support for anomaly detection handling.
Centreon MAP
Centreon MAP underwent a major refresh a couple of years ago, where maps can be fully created and edited from the web user interface: this is called Centreon MAP Web, to differentiate it from the previous version, called MAP legacy.
Centreon MAP Web is now the only version of Centreon MAP:
- Centreon 24.10 includes about 60 enhancements and bug fixes!
- Performance has been increased to support large infrastructures with 1,000s of maps
Important notice: Centreon MAP Legacy retirement
As announced a few months ago, MAP Legacy is no longer supported in Centreon 24.10, being fully replaced by MAP Web. If this has not been done yet, your platform must migrate from MAP Legacy to MAP Web prior to upgrading to 24.10.
Read this announcement if your platform still runs MAP Legacy.
Please contact our support team if you have any questions about this migration.
The Watch Ideas
The Watch is where Centreon users like you can connect to find and offer help, contribute to product development, and share knowledge. In the Ideas section, community members and Centreon staff exchange and discuss improvements that shape Centreon’s evolution.
For the new Centreon 24.10 release, two community-suggested Ideas have been implemented:
- Duplicating a Locked Command: Centreon Monitoring Connectors now allow duplication and editing of Centreon-delivered locked commands.
- Disabling Service Checks for Hosts in a Down State: This new option in the poller configuration menu stops all service checks when a host is not in the Up state.
Check the Ideas section to explore these and other community contributions, or submit your own suggestions for future releases!
Monthly Monitoring Connectors Release
New or updated Monitoring Connectors are released every month. They are independent from the Centreon software version and are not formally part of 24.10.
For information, this is the list of connectors that have been added in the last 6 months:
- Linux Centreon Monitoring Agent
- Windows Centreon Monitoring Agent
- Backbox REST API
- HPE Primera REST API
- Linux Telegraf Agent
- Nokia Isam SNMP
- Eclipse Mosquitto MQTT
- Loggly Rest API
- Windows Telegraf Agent
- Camera Avigilon SNMP
- Quanta Rest API
- RRDcached
- Azure Database for PostgreSQL
- Infor ION Grid
- Veeam WSMAN
The list of new connectors released every month can be found in this section of the online documentation. This list also includes Bug Fixes, Enhancements and Breaking Changes.
Centreon Platform: Debian 12, MariaDB 10.11, MySQL 8, PHP 8.2 support
Each new software version comes with a list of supported operating systems or software components.
Supported Operating Systems:
- Debian 12
- RHEL/Oracle/Alma Linux 9
- RHEL/Oracle/Alma Linux 8
- Rasberry Pi OS (Pollers only)
End of Support:
- 24.10 does not support Debian 11.
- Please note: Centreon is compatible with Debian 11 in-place OS migration to Debian 12.
Supported Databases
- MariaDB 10.11
- MySQL 8.0 (MySQL 8.4 will be supported in a future 24.10.x minor version)
Others
- Centreon 24.10 updates PHP to version 8.2 that ships with supported Linux distributions
Check the compatibility section of the online documentation to keep track of all component compatibility.
What’s next?
- If you are a Centreon Cloud user, your service platform is on a continuous delivery plan and will be updated with no action is required on your end.
- Centreon On-Premise platforms, both open source or commercial editions, can be upgraded to 24.10 using the standard procedures.
- If you’re running 22.10 or earlier versions of Centreon, please be aware 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 of the webinar held on Thursday 31 October 2024, for a demo of all new features and the Questions & Answers session with the Product Managers.
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.