New software release: Centreon 20.10

Centreon version 20.10 improves IT Operations with a more robust, automatic, efficient Cloud-to-Edge IT Monitoring experience.

Yes, it’s that time of the year again: every six months, in april and october, we release a new major software version of our IT Monitoring Platform. So with October 2020 comes Centreon 20.10, the latest software release of our Centreon Open Source, Centreon IT Edition, Centreon Business Edition and Centreon MSP Edition products.

This blog post gives a quick overview of what to expect with 20.10. The best way to discover what Centreon has to offer is to ask for a live demo unless you want to deep dive and read the release notes. Stay tuned also for a series of technical webinars dedicated to 20.10, coming in November, your best opportunity to ask questions to our Product Managers.

Business Resiliency: a stronger Open Source core framework

Organizations of all sizes are working on their Business Resiliency: implementing multi-cloud infrastructure that supports Disaster-Recovery architecture, reengineering software-defined networks all the way from the Cloud to the Edge, and enforcing stricter policies to protect themselves from security threats.

The Centreon Platform, with its Open Source framework and unique distributed architecture, is the solution of choice when monitoring Business Resilient IT infrastructure. Software version 20.10 brings several improvements to the Centreon core framework for even more robustness and security:

1. Up-to-date Linux Operating System for up-to-date security patches
   Centreon 20.10 runs on the latest version of the CentOS or RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system: CentOS8 or RHEL v8.
2. SELinux compatibility for strict security policy enforcement
   Centreon 20.10 is now compatible with Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux), the most popular Linux kernel security module.
3. Multi-Factor user Authentication with OpenID Connect
   Centreon 20.10 now supports the OAuth 2.0 Authorization Code Grant type, an open standard for access delegation, along with the OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication layer, promoted by the OpenID Foundation. All popular Identity Providers implementing Multi-Factor Authentication support this architecture. 
4. ZeroMQ message queue for a streamlined distributed architecture
   The default communication architecture between the Central Server, Remote Servers and Remote Pollers now leverages the ZeroMQ message queue, for streamlined communication flows that better fit highly secure distributed infrastructure.
5. Vulnerability Fix Engagement Plan
   As usual, Centreon implements an engagement plan to fix reported security vulnerabilities in a timely manner, based on their CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) score. Centreon 20.10 software version includes all such vulnerability fixes from previous versions.

These robustness and security enhancements apply to both the Open Source and the Commercial Editions of the Centreon Platform. A dedicated upgrade procedure will be made available to migrate a Centreon server from CentOS7 to CentOS8, or from RHEL v7 to RHEL v8.

Embedded IT Automation: towards a fully automatic asset discovery

Changes to adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic have accelerated a longstanding trend: IT infrastructure is expanding rapidly, leveraging highly dynamic technologies. The only way for IT Operations teams to cope with the daily rate of change is through a comprehensive suite of IT Automation tools and workflows.

The API-Centric Centreon Platform tightly integrates with IT Automation suites such as Ansible Tower. But it also includes its own embedded automation enabler: the Auto-Discovery Engine that automatically discovers changes in dynamics IT assets that must be monitored. Software version 20.10 is a major milestone in the Auto-Discovery Engine development.

1. Remote Host Discovery
   With Centreon 20.10, Host Discovery Rules can now be executed from any remote Poller.
2. Scheduled Host Discovery
   The execution of Host Discovery Rules can now be planned according to a very flexible agenda, choosing for each rule the time of the day and frequency of execution.
3. Flexible Update Policies
   All attributes of newly discovered assets can be mapped to Centreon configuration properties using a mapper object. A flexible Update Policy decides which newly discovered asset should be added to the monitoring configuration or not.

The Auto-Discovery Engine is a key asset to ensure 100% of the IT Landscape is being monitored: you don’t want to miss a critical failure because your monitoring configuration is not up-to-date!

Auto-Discovery capitalizes on the Plugin Pack library for ready-to-use configuration templates and built-in discovery rules. At the time of releasing Centreon 20.10, the Plugin Pack library includes a total of 241 Host or Service discovery rules. New rules are added on a monthly basis.

IT Operations Efficiency: a modern event management User Experience

While organizations keep investing in more sophisticated IT infrastructure to support their Digital Business initiatives or the Everywhere Enterprise of the pandemic era, cost optimization often leads to lean IT Operations teams who rely on the most modern and productive tools to go through their action-packed days in the most efficient manner.

Centreon comes with a complete event management solution designed to cope with the most demanding production environments, a productivity tool for whoever is involved in first-level support: the Resource Status View. It is designed to filter alerts and only show those that matter, to only display relevant information, to give quick access to detailed information when required and to act with a single mouse click.

Originally released in Beta status in last April with a limited set of functionalities, the new Resource Status View is now Generally Available and becomes the default event management view in Centreon 20.10:

1. Streamlined interface that combines Host and Service status
2. Extended list filtering capabilities
3. Filters can be saved, organized, retrieved
4. Extended Status Detail page
5. Timeline view that shows the host or service status change history 
6. Top Counters now redirect to the new Resource Status view

This modern User Experience provides a streamlined navigation with limited clicks between you and a problem that needs fixing. It accelerates root cause analysis and makes your split-second decision-making more accurate.

Please note that the previous Host and Service Status user interfaces are still maintained but will become deprecated in the future.

Centreon 20.10 is all that, and more…

This quick overview highlights three critical areas where Centreon version 20.10 improves IT Operations with a more robust, automatic, efficient Cloud-to-Edge IT Monitoring experience.

But you may find these other topics of note worthy interest:

1. The Plugin Pack library is expanding at a fast rate
   About 70 Plugin Packs were added in the last six months, covering areas such as SD-WAN, WiFi networking, Digital Experience Monitoring, Cloud PaaS, Unified Communications and much more. That makes a total of 470 Plugin Packs now available! The Plugin Pack library guarantees that you’ll always be able to monitor 100% of your IT Landscape, from Cloud-to-Edge and from network to application layers. 
2. ChatOps connector: PagerDuty
   PagerDuty is a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments. Centreon now provides an official connector to PagerDuty. Combining Centreon with PagerDuty, organizations can streamline and simplify IT to maximize performance and availability, support the adoption of new technologies and business processes and ultimately drive business success in a hyper-competitive, always-on world.
3. Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning: Anomaly Detection
   We’re still running the Beta program that we launched in April with the 20.04 software version. We’re currently tweaking our Cloud-Augmented architecture and Anomaly Detection functionality with a first group of users, while developing new applications of our AI/ML engine. Interested in participating in this Beta program? Please fill-in this google form!

As usual, this software release comes with numerous minor improvements and stability fixes: please read the detailed Release Notes in the online documentation to get the complete picture.

Centreon 20.10 is Generally Available (GA) today. 

New to Centreon? Ask for a demo to see if the Centreon platform is for you.

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