Q1 2024 Newsletter
In this issue
- Upgrade to Alma
- Appliance Upgrade
- UI Development kit
- Adapter development kit
- Super-Fast Polling Mode
- IPAM enhancements
- What’s in the context menu?
- Advanced maintenance tools
- What’s coming next?
- Digital Cinema monitoring
- Network Computing Awards
Upgrade to Alma
We are excited to inform you about an essential upgrade to the Core OS of our Mutiny Appliance, transitioning from CentOS 6 to Alma EL8. This upgrade brings numerous enhancements and benefits, ensuring improved performance, security, and reliability for your infrastructure.
Here are some key advantages of upgrading to Alma EL8:
- Enhanced Security Features: Alma EL8 incorporates the latest security protocols and features, providing a more robust defence against potential vulnerabilities and threats. With ongoing support and timely security updates, your system will be better equipped to handle evolving security challenges.
- Performance Optimisation: Alma EL8 is optimised for modern hardware, leveraging technological advancements to enhance performance and efficiency. This translates to faster processing, reduced latency, and overall improved system responsiveness, enabling your operations to run more smoothly and efficiently.
- Long-term Support: By migrating to Alma EL8, you gain access to long-term OS support and maintenance, ensuring continuity and stability for your infrastructure. With regular updates and patches, you can rest assured that your system remains up-to-date and supported for an extended period, reducing the risk of compatibility issues and downtime.
- Compatibility with Latest Software: As technology evolves, so do the software requirements and dependencies. Alma EL8 provides compatibility with the latest software and applications, enabling us to take advantage of new features and functionalities without worrying about compatibility constraints.
- Automated Upgrades: We are excited to introduce a new feature in our upgraded Mutiny Appliance - automated upgrades. With this feature, the appliance can automatically detect and apply OS upgrades, including security patches and new releases. This automation streamlines the upgrade process, reducing manual intervention and ensuring your system is always up-to-date with the latest enhancements and fixes.
- Future-proofing Your Infrastructure: Investing in a new appliance with Alma EL8 ensures the longevity and future-proofing of your infrastructure. With a modern, supported operating system underpinning the Mutiny application, you can confidently plan for future growth and expansion, knowing that your system can adapt to changing requirements and technologies.
Should you have any questions or require further assistance regarding the upgrade process or our latest appliances, please feel free to contact our support team. We are here to assist you every step of the way and ensure a seamless transition to Alma EL8.
Appliance Upgrade
- Given these significant benefits, we strongly recommend purchasing a new, up-to-date Mutiny Appliance. Our latest appliances come pre-installed with Alma EL8, offering out-of-the-box compatibility and performance enhancements tailored to meet the demands of today's dynamic IT landscape.
- By upgrading to a new appliance, you harness the full potential of Alma EL8 and benefit from the latest hardware advancements, ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and scalability for your monitoring needs.
The new appliance starts at £1,056 plus VAT and delivery.
If your current appliance is between 3 and 7 years old, you could also repurpose it as a Cold Standby appliance with a FREE cold standby licence.
Contact support@mutiny.com for more details or to arrange an upgrade.
UI Development Kit
We have added the ability for customers and developers to design and implement their own Status panels and Views.
Supplied on request, we can provide your developers with a kit of sample code and instructions on how to upload your code into the Mutiny shared code space on the appliance.
This will give your organisation the ability to design custom status panels and views that suit your specialised equipment or service. This is especially relevant to service providers who use Mutiny's published views in their customer portals.
These methods also have access to our new Shared Data Area, which allows your new panels to share data from custom adapters and our existing data pool.
Adapter Development kit
Alongside the new Front-end development kit, there is a new adapter development kit. Adapters are the small blocks of code that allow Mutiny to poll, collect, and understand data from the vast array of systems we support out of the box. Vendors who use Mutiny to monitor their own equipment can now use the development kit to support new and emerging data collection methods without the need for us to develop the adapters for them.
Additionally, the adapter development kit allows cycle analysers to be created. These can collate data collected by your custom adapters, perform further analysis and pass the results to the UI development kit for display to your users.
Super-Fast Polling mode
Our MSP/ISP partners demand the maximum out of their Mutiny systems. We already have the fastest combined polling engines on the market, but there was an opportunity to improve things further and give them the fastest alerts from emerging events. We have, therefore, developed new proprietary methods for double or triple-speed polling while at the same time taking measures to reduce false positives from endpoints that suffer periods of packet loss that are not service-affecting.
IPAM enhancements
There have been more features added to the IPAM module; these include:
Show in IPAM context menu item: This allows you to find a node in its IPAM range.
Configurable discovery engines: On a per-range basis, you can now choose which discovery engines to run: Ping - SNMP - DNS(PTR).
IPAM Tags are now searchable in the Advanced Search and Smart View query.
Add to Monitor now supports the {Add with traceroute} feature that the node manager has.
Additional filters for paring down the list of addresses by regex search, monitored, responses, alive, in-use, etc.
Use of manual label priority when adding nodes.
What's in the context menu?
Often missed, a right-click on a node will bring up the context menu containing useful actions.
This is the context panel in the monitoring views. The context panel in the Node manager contains additional tools for reparenting nodes and their children and reordering child nodes by name, IP address, etc.
Digital Cinema monitoring
We're thrilled to announce our recent breakthrough in developing cutting-edge monitoring adapters tailored for Digital Cinema. These innovative adapters are designed to enhance the monitoring process, ensuring more precise and efficient management of digital cinema equipment. As a result, audiences can enjoy a superior viewing experience like never before!
Our latest development includes monitoring support for industry-leading brands such as Sony, Barco, Doremi, Alchemy ICMP, GDC, and Dolby. While these advancements may not directly impact all our customers, they showcase our adaptability and extensive range of monitoring capabilities.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to push the boundaries of innovation in digital cinema monitoring technology!
Advanced maintenance tasks
With Mutiny being used increasingly in the dynamic world of MSP and ISPs, we have added new tools to help manage the ever-changing CPE landscape. Tools that repair SNMP and reconfigure nodes when changes happen, test Nodes for duplicates and reused IP addresses. Scan ports and SNMP system tests.
What's coming next?
As you have come to expect, Mutiny is continually developing new features we know our customers want.
In development right now:
WinRM direct polling: using stored credentials, Mutiny will be able to retrieve data from Windows systems without installing agents. We have a growing list of new things we wish to monitor in this way.
Port discovery engine: In addition to the existing discovery methods, a new method scans for particular ports of the target device regardless of whether we have access to PING or SNMP.
As we transition from CentOS to Alma EL8, we can now take advantage of new and faster versions for Java and PostgeSQL, so expect more performance increases.
Keep an eye on the Release Summary page on the website: https://www.mutiny.com/mutiny-support/release-summary/
Network Computing Awards
We are pleased to have been chosen as a finalist for this year's Bench tested product of the year.
You can see their review here: https://networkcomputing.co.uk/articles/?article_id=13177&Mag=Network
Thank you for being a valued Mutiny Customer