Version 2019.4 has been released and in this month's newsletter we will tell you a bit about the new features it includes. As usual, we recommend that you keep up to date so login into our portal to download and upgrade to v2019.4 as soon as possible.

Improved Office 365 Monitoring

In version v2019.4, the Office 365 Status event monitor has been updated to offer a new option to select the way it connects to Office.com to get the data it needs. Microsoft currently offers two different ways to get service status. Previous versions of our event monitor used v1 of their API however Microsoft now says that they plan to retire it soon in favor of their new v2 API. Even worse, it seems the v1 API is no longer detecting some incidents and advisories that appear in the Office portal itself.

FrameFlow 2019.4 adds a new option to use v2.0 of the API which gets more accurate status. Compared to v1, the new API requires a bit more work to set up but we've included full instructions in the help section. There are a bunch of steps to follow but it usually takes less than 10 minutes to complete them.

While we were working on this, we also updated the Office 365 dashboard panel that shows current status. Now you can mouseover any panel showing an active incident to get more details about the problem. The incident description also appears in the output from the event monitor.

New Status Control Option

For some alerts, you want to know right away. For others, they only become important if a condition has persisted for a while. An example of the second type would be CPU monitoring. It's normal for a system to spike up to 100% for brief periods of time but it becomes a problem if it goes on for a long time.

Through notifications, you've always had the ability to only get email and other alerts after a few failed checks in a row. But on the first failure, alerts will appear right away in Headquarters and on dashboards.

As you can see in the image above, we've added a new status control option that determines how many failures in a row it takes for an alert to change its status. In this example, there were four warnings in a row that resulted in warnings but the status did not change until the fifth one. To help you keep track of status, a new counter appears in the alert text showing you how close the alert is to changing to its full status.

You can find the new status control option in the notifications settings of your event monitors and also in your notification profiles.

Other New Features

Other new features in FrameFlow 2019.4 include:

Updated email templates with better compatibility for desktop versions of Outlook
A new ability to click on dates in HQ and in event lists to switch between relative dates and absolute dates
A new ability to connect to Slack through a proxy server
FrameFlow v2019.4 is available now, so sign into our portal and upgrade today.
A fix for a message about a "stub" when monitoring some Windows event logs

For a complete list of changes, see our change log.

FrameFlow v2019.4 is available now, so sign into our portal and upgrade today.

Wrap Up

That's all for this newsletter. As always, if you have questions or feedback that you would like to share, get in touch because we're always eager to hear your suggestions.

Sincerely,

The FrameFlow Team