FrameFlow Newsletter - November 2020
Keep Up to Date on the Latest FrameFlow News
FrameFlow 2020.11 Released
FrameFlow v2020.11 has been released and is now available for download. In this newsletter, we'll go over some of the new features that it includes. Customers with active subscriptions and perpetual licenses can log into their account on our site to download and upgrade.
New Tutorial: File Event Monitor
One of the most flexible event monitors offered by FrameFlow is our File Event Monitor. Its job is to monitor everything about log files and other types of textual content. Our new tutorial dives in deep to show you how to get the most from it.
In our tutorial you'll learn how to monitor the same log file on multiple systems, how to set the event monitor to only check for content that's new since the last run, and how to monitor files when their names have date/time components that change each day.
Updated Suppression Option
We have made some changes in this release to how the "Suppress Once" option works. Before we dive into the changes, let's go over the suppress feature and how you can best take advantage of it.
The suppress option gives you way to clear alerts out of Headquarters, and other parts of the interface, so you can focus on the ones that most need your attention. To suppress an alert, you use the icon that looks like a bell with a line through it.
Suppressed alerts go to the bottom of whatever list they are included in and are shown in gray text with gray bars. When you suppress an alert, either in the main app or in our Telemetry mobile app, FrameFlow will continue to monitor it but notifications will be paused for it.
With the "Always" option, the alert stays suppressed until you resume it manually. In previous releases the "Once" option would also suppress the alert but it would return to the event list if the condition remained the next time the event monitor ran.
This worked well for alerts that ran infrequently. For example, imagine an event monitor that checks the result of a nightly backup. After checking on the backup you could suppress the alert using "once" and it would drop off the list until the event monitor ran again the next evening. Most monitoring in FrameFlow happens on a more frequent basis, though. It's typical, for example, to run a system health monitor every five or ten minutes.
In FrameFlow v2020.11 we've changed the behavior of the "once" option. Now when you suppress an alert once it will be automatically unsuppressed only if the alert returns to a success state or if the condition becomes worse than it was when you suppressed it.
Let's look at a couple of examples. Let's say you have a warning alert about low disk space on a server. If you suppress the alert it will drop off main list of alerts in HQ. If the condition worsens and the alert escalates to a error or critical state, the alert will be automatically unsuppressed and will pop up again in HQ.
Similarly, if you free up some space and the condition goes back to success, the alert will be unsuppressed and will appear again in the future if space starts to run low again.
New Active Directory Monitoring Options
One of the most widely-used event monitors in FrameFlow is the Active Directory event monitor. It lets you monitor a variety of conditions in Active Directory including when users are added, modified or removed. It can also detect accounts that are locked out and accounts that have not logged in for a long time.
A while ago we added an option to ignore user accounts that have been disabled. FrameFlow v2020.11 adds two more handy options. Some organizations use contact records in AD, and some monitoring actions don't apply to them in the same way as user objects, so we've added a new option that you can use to tell the event monitor to ignore them.
Also, for one reason or another, you may have user accounts that have never been used. The option to alert about users that have not logged in for a long time would flag these all the time. A new option in the event monitor allows you to ignore these user accounts.
SNMP Monitoring Turbo Option (Beta)
Lastly, v2020.11 adds a new "turbo" option for SNMP monitoring. With this option enabled some users, especially those monitoring 100 or more devices, will see increases in SNMP monitoring performance. This new option is currently in beta testing and has already been deployed at a number of customer sites.
To enable turbo mode, edit your config.ini file and look for the section called [SNMP] (it may also appear as [Snmp]) then add a line in that section so it looks like this:
[SNMP]
Turbo=1
If there are any other lines already in the [SNMP] section, make sure to preserve them. Restart the FrameFlow service after saving your changes and the turbo option will be active the next time your SNMP-based event monitors run.
Current Release: v2020.11
Our current release is v2020.11. See our change log for complete details about what's new and improved. It's our recommended stable build so login and upgrade as soon as possible.
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
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