FrameFlow v2020.1 is available on our web site now. This update includes many new features and in this month's newsletter we would like to tell you about some of them.

New Info Status Level

One major addition in v2020.1 is a new status level called Info which, in the hierarchy of statuses, resides between Success and Warning. Info status appears in blue throughout the interface including on dashboards and in event lists.

The Info status level is best used for conditions that you want to know about but aren't important enough to justify a Warning status.

For example, you might have a set of domain controllers that are being watched by an Active Directory event monitor and you're also monitoring them for Windows updates. You want to know when Windows updates have not been installed for a while but it's a lower priority than what you are monitoring in AD itself. Now you can use the Info status level for Windows updates and reserve the higher levels for more important conditions.

New SNMP Monitoring Options

Also new in v2020.1 are several SNMP monitoring options that will help you to optmize your bandwidth and interface monitoring.

One new option is spike control. For a variety of reasons, SNMP counters can get reset on a switch, router or other device. When this happens, the result can be something that looks like a large momentary spike in traffic. Often the spike is so large that it obviously exceeds the ability of the hardware. It's just one data point, but when it happens it wrecks the display of your graphs until the spike it passes off the end of the graph.

With v2020.1 you can enable spike control for your bandwidth monitoring. Turn on the option and choose a threshold that's maybe 50% more than possible for your hardware. After that, any spikes that exceed that threshold will be automatically discarded.

You can also select to treat very low bandwidth rates as zero. This saves a significant amount of storage space and can be very useful in larger monitoring configurations where there are hundreds of switches and routers being monitored.

Interface Favorites

Also new is the ability to mark selected interfaces as favorites. In many cases there are only a few interfaces on a switch or router that you're really concerned about. Filtering them by their ifIndex value can be a pain so we've added an easier way.

First, in your device settings, make sure the device type has been set to Switch / Router. That unlocks the Interfaces tab for the device. Next, while still in your device settings, make sure you've selected an SNMP Profile and then use the Actions menu to refresh the list of devices.

Once the refresh is complete you can click on an interface row and a star will appear marking it as a favorite. Now you can tell your SNMP bandwidth and interface monitors to only check favorites which will increase performance and reduce the storage requirements on your FrameFlow server.

Oh, and if you click again you can mark an interface to be ignored. Ignored interfaces will be skipped by your interface and bandwidth monitors. Click one more time to restore the interface to regular status.

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