OpsCenter 5.2.0 Release Notes

Release notes for the OpsCenter version 5.2.0 release.

New features 

Backup Service

  • Fixed issue restoring from "Other Location" when using S3. (OPSC-5915)
  • Fixed double error message dialogs from appearing when enabling commitlog archiving. (OPSC-4200)
  • Highlight row in Backup Activity grid upon hover. (OPSC-5446)
  • Remove JNA warning when taking snapshots. (OPSC-2032)
  • System keyspaces can no longer be restored directly via the API. (OPSC-1966)
  • Fixed issue with agent not starting up properly when it cannot find the location of commitlog_archiving.properties. (OPSC-5076)
  • Fixed issue with backup destinations not being properly cleared from cluster_name.conf after ad hoc backups. (OPSC-4570)
  • Fixed issue with "tmplink" sstables during restore. (OPSC-5510)
  • Fixed issues with restoring directly via the API and not specifying a list of tables. (OPSC-5457, OPSC-5262)
  • Fixed issue with position of Create Backup dialog in UI. (OPSC-3951)
  • Fixed issue with restoring a table after OpsCenter auto-recreates from a stored schema. (OPSC-3927)

Best Practice Service

  • Added ability to hover on a Best Practice rule to view its description. (OPSC-3137)
  • Added a best practice rule to encourage users to encrypt sensitive configuration values. (OPSC-4462)

Provisioning and configuration

  • Ability to provision nodes using GossipingPropertyFileSnitch. (OPSC-960)
  • Support for AWS VPC when creating clusters/nodes in the EC2 Cloud. (OPSC-3429)
  • Java class name suggestions are now given for various cassandra.yaml properties when configuring the cluster. (OPSC-3853)
  • When configuring a cluster, start_native_transport is now read-only because this is required to be set to true for OpsCenter to work. (OPSC-4224)
  • Add warning when adding nodes with a different DataStax Enterprise version than existing nodes. (OPSC-2493)
  • Fixed creating a new cluster with non-default data directories. (OPSC-3198)
  • Improved stability in Cloud provisioning. (OPSC-4508)
  • Improved error handling when Java is not installed on target machines. (OPSC-3443)

Repair Service

  • When the Repair Service estimates it cannot finish a repair in the time given, the repair no longer stops running, and sends an ALERT with an updated estimated time to complete the repair. (OPSC-4599)
  • Optimize JMX connections the agents by reusing between subrange repairs. (OPSC-2091)
  • Percent complete is now properly restored when the Repair Service restarts. (OPSC-4532)

Diagnostic tarball

  • Users will be prompted to enter the location of system.log when downloading a diagnostics tarball if it cannot be found in a standard location. (OPSC-1854)
  • Spark configuration and log files are now included. (OPSC-3653)
  • solrconfig.xml, schema.xml, and size of solr.data directory are now included. (OPSC-2450, OPSC-2596)
  • Sample of cfhistograms are now included. (OPSC-3954)

Other improvements 

  • opscenterd now connects to your cluster via native transport instead of thrift. (OPSC-3279)
  • Labs feature added allowing users to directly link to some sections in the UI. (OPSC-5254)
  • Labs feature to import/export Dashboard configurations Dashboard configurations. (OPSC-1562)
  • Added ability to encrypt sensitive properties in OpsCenter config files. (OPSC-3744)
  • Number of connected clients added to Node dialog. (OPSC-2115)
  • Static content is now gzipped to optimize UI load time.
  • Added Search: Core Size metric to monitor and alert on disk space used by Solr cores. (OPSC-3523)
  • Support non-ascii character sets for LDAP roles. (OPSC-4819)
  • Added warning when cloning schema-related graphs. (OPSC-3649)

Other fixes

  • Fixed consistency issues causing changes to Dashboards/Graphs to be lost. (OPSC-4359)
  • Fixed issue with rolling restart not failing properly when DataStax Enterprise fails to startup. (OPSC-4875)
  • Fixed issue with automatic agent installation attempting to use yum on some Ubuntu environments. (OPSC-5184)
  • Properties defined in address.yaml now take precedence over properties defined in opscenterd.conf files. (OPSC-4619)
  • Fixed issue where the Select All check box in the List View would choose all nodes in the cluster rather than only the visible nodes. (OPSC-4097)
  • Fixed sorting by Status in List View. (OPSC-4935)
  • Fixed nodes from being displayed as tiny slivers in Ring View. (OPSC-5315)
  • Cluster selection drop-down lists now properly show custom-configured names. (OPSC-4046)
  • The agent will now fail to start up if multiple jar files are found. (OPSC-4905)
  • Corrected rounding math in percentile graphs to match behavior in DataStax Enterprise. (OPSC-5443)
  • Improved handling of metrics overflow queue on agent. (OPSC-4618)
  • Fixed Alerts link when managing multiple clusters. (OPSC-5857)
  • Fixed cloning Dashboard configurations after first load of UI. (OPSC-5284)
  • Removed unnecessary validation of settings when deleting a managed cluster. (OPSC-5055)
  • Improved error messages on login page. (OPSC-5021)
  • Rebalance menu option now disabled for clusters using vnodes. (OPSC-3957)
  • Fixed Cluster Report and Diagnostics tarball failing in some disk configurations. (OPSC-3153)
  • Fixed issues with agent OOM when storing metrics for large numbers of tables. (OPSC-5934)
  • Fixed long table names getting cutoff in the Data section. (OPSC-1685)

Notable changes

Thrift
  • As a result of the thrift connections being removed in favor of native transport (CQL), versions DataStax Enterprise 4.0+ or Cassandra 2.0+ are required for OpsCenter version 5.2 +.
  • Thrift connections have been removed from OpsCenter. There are no longer any thrift connections from OpsCenter to a DataStax Enterprise or Cassandra cluster. A thrift connection remains for the Hadoop job tracker only.
  • Adding and editing thrift column families is no longer supported.
  • If you are restoring data from a thrift column family that no longer exists, you are now responsible for creating the thrift column family in DataStax DevCenter prior to restoring.
  • As a result of moving from thrift to native transport, the Data Explorer feature has been removed from OpsCenter. The Data Explorer feature in OpsCenter has been deprecated in favor of DataStax DevCenter, a visual CQL tool. Find more information about DevCenter and a link to download at http://www.datastax.com/what-we-offer/products-services/devcenter. (OPSC-5338)
  • Adding new keyspaces in OpsCenter is no longer supported. Add new keyspaces in DataStax DevCenter or using CQLSH instead. Editing and deleting keyspaces is still supported in OpsCenter.
  • All references to "Column Family" in the UI have been changed to reflect the modern "Table" nomenclature. (OPSC-4784)

Known issues

  • When there are agent connectivity issues, OpsCenter cannot determine the endpoint snitch and reports the snitch as unknown. (OPSC-5733)
  • If you set config_encryption_key_path in the address.yaml file and do not append a trailing slash to the end of the directory name, OpsCenter throws an authentication error. (OPSC-5357)
  • If a storage cluster has SSL configured but the monitored cluster does not, connection failures ensue. Ensure the storage cluster and the monitored clusters use the same authentication and credentials. (OPSC-5929)

Compatibility 

To see which versions of OpsCenter are compatible with the various Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise versions, see the OpsCenter Compatibility chart.