Release Notes: May 2024

2024-05-10

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 End of Life Reminder

This changelog notice is a follow up to the in-product notification that affected customers have already received, and is intended as a reminder.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.9, the last release in this series, will reach End of Life (EOL) upstream on June 30th, 2024 for customers who have not purchased the Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) from Red Hat. Per our existing policy, we will move into the End of Support stage on this date, with an expected End of Life date for ThousandEyes Enterprise Agents installed on RHEL 7.x of August 30th, 2024.

Please ensure you migrate these agents to a supported distribution as soon as possible, and contact your ThousandEyes Support or Account teams if you have any questions or concerns.

For more information on how to use the virtual agent cluster feature to support migrating test configurations to a new agent, see Replacing an Enterprise Agent using the Agent Clustering Method.

New Templates

This release introduces the following ThousandEyes certified templates for monitoring SaaS applications:

• Slack Template: Monitor your Slack instance based on your Slack tenant name, WebSocket, and CDN, without the BrowserBot-enabled agents.

• Slack Application-Layer Template: Monitor your Slack instance, WebSocket, CDN, and API with the BrowserBot-enabled agents.

  You can select either template based on your Enterprise Agent types. Learn more here: Monitoring Slack.

• Salesforce Template: Monitor your Salesforce instance based on your Salesforce tenant name including the following tests

  • Authoritative DNS

  • Salesforce Classic

  • Salesforce Lightning

  • Login

  • DNS Trace

  • Static Assets

  • Files

  You can learn more here: Monitoring Salesforce.

• Zoom Template: Monitor your Zoom instance based on your Zoom tenant name. This template includes the following tests:

  • Zoom Application

  • Zoom Cloud Room Connector

  • DNS

  • DNS Trace

  You can learn more here: Monitoring Zoom.

API Test Type Updates

• Both the API Transaction Time and API Completion metrics will now be shown by default for the API test type in Views 2.0.

• PATCH is now available for API tests when configuring the Target API as one of the available methods.

• The default test interval is now aligned with the overall recommended test interval for Cloud and Enterprise Agent tests, which is two minutes. All existing API tests are unaffected.

• An issue occurred where API test type alerts were misfiring for step-specific alerts. This has been resolved, and the metrics at start now show the API step level metrics for the round where the alert fired.

Limited Outages Map for Internet Insights

We’ve recently released the limited outages map, enabling users to gain partial insights into global application and network outages even without an Internet Insights subscription. In order to access the limited outages map, log in to the ThousandEyes platform and select Internet Insights from the navigation pane on the left.

For more information, see Limited Outage Map.

New Cloud Agents

New Cloud Agents have been added in the locations listed below. For a full list of Cloud Agents, see ThousandEyes Cloud Agent Locations.

• Auckland, New Zealand (One NZ) (IPv6)

• Doha, Qatar (Vodafone)

• Doha, Qatar (Vodafone) (IPv6)

2024-05-10 Bug Fixes

• An issue was resolved where users were not able to see all test labels when selecting the Test Label filter in the Synthetic Tests tab from the Endpoint Test Settings section. The user can now scroll down the list to see all the test labels available.

2024-05-23

Updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux End of Life Dates

We have been made aware of an error in our current lifecycle documentation and support policies due to a change made in the End of Life (EOL) dates upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

RHEL 8.8, RHEL 8.9, RHEL 9.2, and RHEL 9.3 have an EOL date of May 31 2024 (rather than April 30, 2024) and RHEL 9.4 has an EOL date of April 30, 2026 (unchanged), according to the official Red Hat documentation.

Our policy documentation and the Agent Controller have been corrected. In alignment with our lifecycle policy, we provide customers an additional 60 day grace period after RHEL's EOL date prior to considering that version EOL for the our Enterprise Agent.

As such, our Enterprise Agent for RHEL 8.9 (which is a current short-lived release) will now be EOL on July 30th, 2024 (rather than June 29th, 2024).

We strongly recommend that you do not deploy short-lived RHEL releases without Extended Update Support (EUS) into your production environments, as these releases have lifecycles that do not overlap.

Long-lived releases continue receiving all necessary patches, and have much longer lifecycles that overlap one another, allowing for easier transitions and upgrades for production environments.

We recommend customers currently using RHEL 8.9 upgrade to RHEL 8.10 (released May 22, 2024), which will be supported until 2029.

UI for Configuring ThousandEyes for OpenTelemetry

ThousandEyes for OpenTelemetry streaming integrations can now be configured from the platform UI. To add a new integration, navigate to the Integrations page and click on the + New Integration button, then select ThousandEyes for OpenTelemetry from the list of integration types.

Existing integrations that have been configured with the API will be shown in the list on the Integrations page. To edit an existing streaming integration, click on the integration in the list to open the Edit OpenTelemetry Integration dialog for that integration.

For more information, see Configuring ThousandEyes for OpenTelemetry Using the UI.

Support for API Test Type

ThousandEyes for OpenTelemetry now supports the API test type. You can start streaming API test data points in addition to all other ThousandEyes test data already available in OpenTelemetry now, as well as add API tests to existing streams by assigning the test to the tag associated with the stream through the Tags API.

The new API test metrics are:

• Base metrics: api.metrics.completion and api.metrics.time. They contain the attributes error.type and error.details.

• Metrics per API test step: api.step.metrics.completion and api.step.metrics.time. They contain the attributes step, url.full and http.request.method.

For more information on metrics and how to add API tests to your existing streams, see ThousandEyes for OpenTelemetry Metrics.

New Endpoint Alert Rules UI

Starting May 21, 2024, users will see a new UI for the Alert Rules > Endpoint Agents page. This UI will make alert configuration more intuitive, and offer better performance and load times.

Browser Synthetics Support for WebGL Pages

Page load and transaction tests now support loading web pages that use WebGL. For web pages that trigger a browser-native notification, transaction tests will now bypass these notifications.

Webex Dynamic Test 2.0

We have introduced a new version of the Webex dynamic test to support Webex Calling and use media stream classification to identify and test media servers only. The configuration of the existing Webex dynamic test is not changed. However, an issue has been identified with these tests wherein the tests indicated 100% packet loss when VPN was used, even though the actual calls were not affected. This issue will be resolved in the next Endpoint Agent Client release.

Minor Enhancements

• We have enhanced the selection helper sidebar for the tests dashboard filter by streamlining how to view only tests that were selected in widgets, and how to view only enabled tests.

• For page load tests, the metric presented in Views 2.0 in Summary is now DOM Load Time, and Page Load Time is now consistent with Views 1.0.

• The maximum number of streaming integrations per account group has been increased from 1 to 5, allowing you to create more streams to suit your needs.

2024-05-23 Bug Fixes

• An issue was resolved where the dashboard selector list was not surfaced in the expected order of most recent to oldest.

• Previously, when clicking a specific test in the Test Settings tab for Endpoint Agents, the "Agents running the tests" value was incorrect. This has now been resolved, and the correct number of agents running the test is displayed.

• An issue with timestamp inconsistencies for PDF exports of dashboards has been resolved.

• An issue that was showing inconsistent availability metrics for the scheduled tests in the Agent View for Endpoint Agents has been resolved. The availability was showing the opposite value (i.e., 0% when it was 100%), and the correct data is now shown.

2024-05-29

Dashboard Templates

Dashboard templates are an easy and efficient way to deploy commonly used widgets and dashboard layouts that will help you visualize your ThousandEyes data better. You can fully utilize the power of ThousandEyes by leveraging dashboards to diagnose overall network and application health and to streamline troubleshooting.

These templates enable you to visualize the tests and critical metrics in one place without requiring the expertise to configure custom dashboards for different use cases, user personas, or teams.

Dashboard templates are available for Cloud and Enterprise Agents. You can learn more about deploying them in Dashboard Templates.

Endpoint Agent Client Version 1.195.4

The following enhancements have been made to the Endpoint Agent client:

All Platforms

• Fixed an issue where the agent applied incorrect capabilities to VPN-related synthetic tests.

• An issue previously identified with the dynamic test for Webex Calling has been resolved. The tests indicated 100% packet loss when VPN was used, even though the actual calls were unaffected.