May 6, 2023

To:              Customers of DX Operational Intelligence (OI), DX Application Performance Management (APM) and DX App Experience Analytics (AXA)

From:          Broadcom’s AIOps Product Team

Subject:       General Availability Announcement for DX Operational Intelligence and DX Application Performance Management (including DX App Experience Analytics) 24.1 version

On behalf of Broadcom, we appreciate your business and the opportunity to provide you with high-quality, innovative software and services. As part of our ongoing commitment to customer success, we regularly release updated versions of our products. Today, we are pleased to announce that the combined release of DX Operational Intelligence (DX OI) and DX Application Performance Management (DX APM including DX App Experience Analytics (DX AXA)) 24.1 version is now available.

This combined release highlights our commitment to unified user experience and streamlined workflows for AIOps and Observability. It introduces multiple new capabilities like dark mode, hotspot inspector (triage), logs for triage, push based integrations, thread dumps in metric browser, and application onboarding profiles. It also extends our focus on role based access and privileges control for DX Dashboards. This release also packages a lot of finesse for the DX Dashboards, alarm management and management modules related workflows. 

The following are highlights of enhancements in this release:

DX Operational Intelligence

Centralized Alarm Management

• Alarms inspector (Hotspot inspector) with contextual information about the problems to identify the root cause faster and take action. It provides suspect alarms, related alarms, topology, transaction, metrics, logs and more in context in a single view
• Alarm workflows have been enhanced for operators and subject matter experts to help teams collaborate effectively with alarm assignment notifications, leveraging channel policies to trigger policies manually with the available template on demand, manual ticket linking to multiple alarms, ticket status to alarms and many more
• The maintenance alarms workflow is now fully aligned with the maintenance schedules to eliminate those alarms from participating in root cause analysis, trigger notification channels,  ticketing or automation tools. 

Service Observability 

• Service driven predictive capacity analytics has been enhanced to improve the projection accuracy, introduce 3 month projections and evidences for actual metrics and confidence scores to facilitate the capacity projections as being useful for decision making 
• The capacity prediction alarms can now be controlled to eliminate alarm noise while the algorithm is still learning seasonality from the incoming metrics 

Integrations 

• This release introduces push based integrations to support direct integrations using ingestion APIs without requiring additional utility. It aims to eliminate the sizing efforts required for the integration utility to a large extent. 
• Open Data Connector version 1 was also introduced as the next generation of RestMon connector with the aim of opening up the supported languages for integration schema generation and as well as reducing the sizing footprint required. 
• Channel templates, policies and configurations can be exported and imported from this release onwards to make it easy to promote validated configurations from one tenant/environment to another

Monitored Inventory

• Monitored entities can be exported to excel with selected filters applied for reporting purposes
• Saved filters have been added to allow creation of views and save time in finding the entities of interest

Logs for Triage

• With this release logs support will be added to enhance the triage use cases. Users will be able to:
• Ingest logs: Out of the box formats supported and custom parsing of logs also available 
• 360 degree observability view: Logs can be viewed in context of a problem from alarms or monitored inventory entry points 
• Alarms: Log patterns can be identified to generate alarms and extend further the observability use cases in AIOps

DX Application Performance Management

Application Monitoring Administration  

• Management modules CRUD workflows have been optimized to maintain context across different operations and help users plan and organize monitoring easily
• Export and import management modules aim to eliminate redundant efforts 
• Application onboarding workflows have been added for intuitive application onboarding process with end-to-end coverage across application tiers 
• Cloud proxy supportability metrics have been enhanced to identify more granular information about the Cloud Proxy connection, such as network connection, memory usage and so forth. In addition CPU and network metrics for cloud proxy can be fine tuned to optimize performance. 
• The user interface of ACC is redesigned to unify it with the Application Performance Management user interface for consistent user experience

Application Triage 

• Java thread dumps for current and historical thread dump data will be available in the metric browser to help troubleshooting faster
• Agent connectivity calculator and agent counts summary will be now available to aid self monitoring and issue triaging at agent level for the practitioners 
• Metric view has been enhanced to show transaction trace sessions in context to help users identify performance issues related to the transaction trace

Monitoring Agents

• UMA expanded support for: 
• Auto-attach for Nginx and support for Nginx versions: 1.21.6, 1.22.1, 1.24.0,1.23.3 and 1.23.4.
• s390 platform support for Ubi8 images 
• Gravitron support for Ubi8 images
• Openshift version 4.13 and 4.14
• UMA agent now supports loading the Java Agent when the JVM starts by employing the UMA Java Agent’s attachment using a sidecar approach 
• In this release, UMA Agent adds support for the UMA Containerized Service Architecture Java Agent, which is designed to optimize resource utilization during startup for micro-service containerized applications. For more information, see UMA Support for CSA Agent.
• Various enhancements to expand version support for .Net agents and Java agents keeping a continuous focus to support modern and traditional environments on a single platform

DX Dashboards

• Dashboards will support 1 min refresh interval so the users can leverage the granularity in monitoring data supported by monitoring agents and ingestion APIs
• This release will make it easier to duplicate the dashboards so the users don't have to spend redundant efforts in creating multiple versions with different variations 
• Universe based access and privileges control will be extended to all user roles with this release supporting the security and audit requirements
• New out of the box dashboards to provide jump start with monitoring agents and templates: APM: GC Monitor, GC Heap, EM Overview, APIM Embedded dashboard and many more 

This release will support in-place upgrades from versions 23.2 and 23.3. Helm charts were added to the installer from the 23.2 version onwards to make install and upgrades easier for our customers. This release further simplifies pre-qualification steps and backup and recovery procedures. 

Above mentioned are highlights of the enhancements. For details checkout the product release notes for version 24.1 (DX Application Performance Management Release Notes, DX Operational Intelligence Release Notes).

To connect, learn and share with other customers, join and participate in our DX Operational Intelligence Global User Community or DX APM Global User Community. To review Broadcom Support lifecycle policies, please check the Broadcom Support Policy and Terms at https://support.broadcom.com/ by navigating to the Support Policies link. To leverage the training and education content, visit Broadcom Academy. 

Thank you again for your business.