ITRS Geneos Update

It is now coming up to almost an year since the pandemic lockdown started for most of us. Throughout this time we have continued to release new updates to Geneos. For the always-on enterprise users of Geneos, it is more important now than ever to keep on top of things. It is great to be able to share some recent updates to the product and what to expect in the next release.

Huge increases in online, cashless and mobile transactions

The systems required to process these transactions are often dependent on complex layers of technology from services running in cloud and containers on one hand to the more legacy services running in mainframe systems like IBM-i. Visibility across this stack is key to monitoring the end-to-end business process.

• Recent updates to Geneos allow Netprobes to be natively deployed in containerised environments like Kubernetes to dynamically collect metrics and logs. Both Gateways and Netprobes are now available as Docker images for easy deployment. We continue to work on this to support the increasing usage of containers and orchestration technology.
• We are able to monitor the three main cloud platforms: AWS, Azure and Google. We are soon to release an updated Azure plugin to monitor more of the services available in Azure and to do it with minimal configuration. Likewise updates to AWS and Google plugins are on the roadmap.
• IBM-i monitoring capabilities are greatly enhanced to not only monitor the system, but also consume log files, message queue and query DB2 database. This allows Geneos to reach into the back-end systems to build the end-to-end visibility.

Security has been a key focus for some time now and we expect that to continue

• Geneos can now integrate with CyberArk password vault. When required Gateway and Netprobe can retrieve password from vault rather than having to store the password in Gateway configuration.
• SQL-Toolkit plugin now supports the more secure windows authentication (Kerberos) when connecting to SQL Server from Linux environments.
• We continue to update various libraries to path known vulnerabilities. See release notes for more details.

Monitoring dynamic environments and reducing configuration burden

Reducing configuration is a key aim for us. As we start to see increasing use of dynamic environments, Genoes configuration needs to be more dynamic as well.

• Dynamic Entities feature of the Gateway lets to create entities dynamically with minimal configuration so that for example as you increase your workloads to cope with demand, the monitoring of those workloads is also enabled automatically.
• Self-Announcing Netprobes can discover meta data about the environment its running in and pass that to external services via URL to receive its configuration. This allows monitoring to be enabled automatically without needing to update Gateway configuration to add Probes and Managed Entities.
• Self-monitoring of Gateway is now turned on by default so that each Gateway automatically creates an entity with useful information about the various functions of the Gateway. In upcoming release, we hope to do the same for system level monitoring so that you get CPU, Memory, Disk, Hardware, Network and Processes metrics are available by default with minimal configuration.

What is coming to you over the next couple of releases:

• New updated Azure monitoring capabilities
• New system monitoring capabilities with minimal configuration
• Ability to stream the log data that Netprobe is collection into Splunk. Remember we can already do this for Elasticsearch.
• Role based access control for Geneos data and configuration in Gateway Hub
• A handy tool to help migrate Gateway configuration into Hub for centralised config management
• Various improvements to Fix Analyser, including being able to consume FIX logs from container workloads
• Ability to consume Prometheus metrics and alerts into Geneos
• Updated VMware plugin to support large scale enterprise deployments

Lots to look forward to and as always we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!