What's New Q1 2013 Edition by Brian Clapper
Posted ~ 2013-03-18
I’ll start this update talking about the most obvious changes to the UI, which is our new completely horizontal navigation and new URL structure. View Full Post »
Data overlays allow visualizing your data in powerful ways. See how today compares to yesterday, last week or last year. You can even run statistical regressions to plan for the future.
Read more from the Blog
Below is a list of the newest features and enhancements in the current production build of Circonus. Please check our “Why Us” section for more information on the full Circonus feature set or our pricing page for detailed package information.
Contact Groups have moved from the account profile page and are now under the Alerts section. As such, they are manageable by all normal users, not just admins. The Contact Group management UI also has been redesigned for improved clarity and usability.
In addition to being able to send generic test messages to Contact Groups, users can now enter their own messages.
We’ve added a check that will allow checking mail retrieval via the POP3 protocol.
Gauge, Text, and Chart widgets now can be set to update in real-time, at the interval of your choice (between 1-30s). Graph widgets can also now be set to stream their graphs in real-time.
You can now sync rules across templates as easily as you sync checks. Under the list of bundles for each template is a checkbox to include rulesets, if you select this, each time you apply template changes or re-sync the template, the rules will also be synced. You are also given a new option to re-sync rules on their own if you made changes you want to apply. Note that unselecting the box and re-syncing will not remove rules, so you can quickly splash standard rules across hosts, and then stop syncing them to make host specific changes.
To help support additional browsers, we’ve replaced underscores with dashes in account urls. Old URLs will continue to “work” by redirecting you to the new format.
If the URL for your webhook ends in .json (e.x. /alerts/circonus.json) we will POST you a JSON payload instead of individual parameters.
Access to your Circonus account now happens via a subdomain like accountname.circonus.com. Old URLs will continue to work for the time being but any bookmarks should be updated to the new format.
The much awaited in app documentation is live here
A long awaited feature is now live. Maintenance windows can now be set on multiple levels, and there is a new maintenance page located in the fault detection section to handle all your current and future windows. At the lowest level, you can still set maintenance on an individual metric, going up from there you can also set a window on a check, an entire host or your account if need be. With this change, the old v1 API maintenance management has been removed in favor of new methods in API v2.
The Quick Graph button that appears when looking at metrics or alerts has been changed to go to the graph edit page, allowing you to more quickly manipulate the metric or add more data to the graph before saving.
When a new app request comes in for access through one of your API Tokens, you now have the option of denying it immediately, instead of having to approve it first in order to deny it, as before.
Contact groups now have an envelope icon which when clicked will send a test message to everyone in that group via their selected contact method.
The navigation menus have been completely redesigned. They’re now all integrated and completely horizontal, for ease of use and readability. Despite the fact that we’ve managed to fit more menu into a shorter space than before, the new menu still helps you get around the site more quickly than the previous menu (thanks to the new submenu system). And last (but not least), the vague, context-dependent ‘+’ tab has gone away. Each page now has its own explicitly labeled button(s) at the top to allow you to create new items.
Inactive hosts and check bundles in a template are now hidden in the UI. You can reactivate either item by clicking the “Add Host” or “Add Bundle” buttons, they will appear in that list grayed out, clicking on the entry will add them back to the template.
The NewRelic check has been updated to take advantage of their new API. You now only need an API key to pull your data.
You can now create shared versions of worksheets like you’ve been able to do with graphs. These shared worksheets are viewable to the public (no authentication required) and are viewable in IE9+, just like the shared graphs.
Support has been added to use OAuth 2.0. Future Google authorizations will utilize OAuth 2.0 tokens instead of 1.0 tokens.
You may now select the DB index to perform your Redis commands on.
The broker page has been changed to pull non-active brokers to their own table at the top and has a progress bar for their current status. Expanding the row will give a short description of what the next step is to get it activated.
You can now silence a contact group for a set period of time. Setting the silence will stop all notifications sent to that group, when the silence time expires reminders / new alerts will send off as normal. This is configurable from your account profile, look for the settings for individual contact groups.
You can now control the formatting of certain dashboard widget values to have them use their raw values instead of the autoformatted one (i.e. show 500 instead of .5k)
Graphs now have a line style option in the toolbox that lets you pick between stepped and interpolated renderings.
Color pickers have now been updated to use the Hue/Saturation/Value color model rather than RGB, for easier visual choosing of colors.
To accompany the metric visualization graphs on the Metrics page, the Display Check page, and Alerts pages, we’ve added Quick Graph buttons which take you to viewing a Quick Graph of that metric, which you can save or discard. We’ve also added fullscreen buttons to the metric visualization graphs on those pages which will open a full-sized Quick Graph in a modal overlay for you to quickly view with data overlays, etc.
We’ve added a Statsd check that will allow pushing data to Enterprise Brokers via the Statsd protocol.
We’ve added a Common Information Model (CIM) check that will allow checking data on CIM systems.
We’ve added an Nginx check that will allow checking data from Nginx systems.
We’ve added a DHCP check that will allow checking data from DHCP servers (Enterprise Brokers only).
We have added TLS support into the SMTP check
We have added support for setting the version of HTTP to use for HTTP checks
A new user preference was added for disabling/enabling the display of histogram sparklines by default. A toggle keybinding (the ‘h’ key) was also added to enable temporary toggling of histogram sparklines while viewing a graph.
Disabled datapoints no longer show up in graph legend tables.
Now when hovering over a histogram datapoint, a sparkline representation of the Y Axis will appear on the graph to provide another visualization of the distribution of the data.
The legend rows for histogram data have been updated to bold the percentage of data points in the current bucket, and also now have arrows showing the percent of data above and below the current bucket.
The Graph API now supports specifying the alpha channel for datapoint colors, ex. #26EBD474 (area graphs only).
The Status widget (used to be Admin widget) now has a second mode where you can view the statuses of your account hosts with list, grid, or compact layouts, just like on the Data->Hosts page.
When showing the timestamp in a graph legend column (due to hovering over the graph), the timestamp is now taken from the graph data so it’s accurate and reflects the time rollups used.
The metric visualization graphs on the check display page, metrics page, and alerts dashboard have been updated so if that metric is collecting histogram data, you can switch the metric viz graph to histogram mode via the dropdown box.
The Agent Statuses widget view has been updated so it reflects the updates recently made to the account agents page. We also added a context menu to the widget, providing a quick link to the account agents page.
The Status widget (for displaying HTML or text-formatted metric values) has been renamed as the Text widget, and the Admin widget has been renamed as the Status widget, for greater clarity.
When the dashboard ‘Add Widget’ panel is open and the user is scrolling down the page, the ‘close panel’ tab now remains visible beside the panel so the user doesn’t have to scroll up the page just to close the panel.
The first pass at the rollout of new user preferences lets you set options like how many items to display on a page, what your default graph colors should be and what options you want for graph zoom levels. Go to /user/preferences to set them!
The agents (brokers) page has been updated with a new layout to make it easier to scan the list and pick out disconnected brokers or ones that might need an update.
Check configuration pages have been updated to no longer do DNS resolutions of targets automatically. Instead we have added a ‘Check Target’ button you can use to perform the resolution manually, or you can just bypass the button and test the check to use the target you entered.
We’ve added a few new layout options for the hosts page. Grid transforms the page into a grid view, with sorting going from left to right, top to bottom with the host names highlighted in green, yellow, orange or red depending on any alert severities. Compact takes the grid a step further and shows only the host names highlighted in the appropriate color. There is also a full screen mode and settings on how often to update the page.
New native check for IMAP services
* Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
