Our scripting event monitors give you a powerful mechanism to integrate custom actions into FrameFlow's monitoring and alerting engines. With just a few lines of code you can often cover those special monitoring requirements that are unique to your organization.

You've always had the option to use PowerShell, JavaScript, PerlScript and VBScript to develop your monitoring scripts. In FrameFlow v2019.3 we are adding a new option: Now you'll be able to integrate your Python scripts with FrameFlow.

Python is a general-purpose scripting language that has become increasingly popular with system administrators. It offers a nice mix of ease-of-use and cross-platform compatibility. To use the event monitor, make sure you have installed Python on your FrameFlow server. We recommend Python 3.7.3 or later but any recent version will work. The Python script event monitor will be available in FrameFlow v2019.3 which is due for release on July 25th.

FrameFlow v2019.2 Updates

We have recently released a number of small updates to FrameFlow v2019.2 and we would like to tell you a bit about them. The current release is v2019.2 build 4456 and here are some of the recent changes:

If you upgraded some of your hosts to VMware 6.7 you probably noticed that some of your "legacy" VMware event monitors were not able to connect. That's because VMware 6.7 disables TLS 1.0 and 1.1 by default. These two protocols are known to be insecure and it's best practice to disable them and rely on the newer TLS 1.2 protocol. That said, you may have older systems that can't be patched or upgrade just yet so for now FrameFlow needs to support them too. In build 4456 we updated the older event monitors so they will now retry with TLS 1.2 if the older protocols have been locked down on the monitored systems.

Similarly, SQL Server is dropping support for older versions of TLS. Starting with build 4456, FrameFlow will detect when it cannot connect to due protocol mismatches and will use a newer SQL server driver, if it has been installed. If you are affected, upgrade to the latest FrameFlow build and install the "Microsoft OLE DB Driver 18 for SQL Server".

FrameFlow v2019.3: July 25th

As we mentioned above, FrameFlow 2019.3 is due for release on July 25th. It will include the new Python scripting event monitor, support for monitoring SNMP tables, improvements for SNMP bandwidth monitoring and a lot more. Mark the date on your calendar or just wait for our next newsletter which will have complete details about the new features and functionality.

Wrap Up

That's all for this newsletter but if you have comments, suggestions or any other kind of feedback, we want to hear from you so don't hesitate to get in touch.

Sincerely,

The FrameFlow Support Team