February 16, 2023
For DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) customers, upgrading to the latest release has significant benefits – and that’s especially true with the latest version, release 20.4 cumulative update 6 (DX UIM 20.4 CU6). It offers a significant number of enhancements and new capabilities.
DX UIM 20.4 CU6 provides teams with several advantages, including enhanced accessibility, improved operational efficiency, and richer insights. Read on to find out more about some of the most important enhancements and capabilities now available.
Better Accessibility, Improved Usability
DX UIM 20.4 CU6 conforms to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 WAI AA for accessibility.
WCAG is a set of technical requirements for making web-based content like websites and web-based applications accessible for users of every ability, including people with disabilities who use assistive technology.
Guidelines adopted are defined in numerous global laws, including:
- Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (VPAT)
- Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA)
These updates provide the following attributes:
- Perceivable: Presents information that can be perceived in different ways, where a user can adjust color contrast or font size.
- Operable: User will be able to perform required interactions using a keyboard or voice commands, not just a mouse.
- Understandable: Improved user flows so that information and instructions are clear and navigation methods are easy to understand and use.
- Robust: Content is robust enough so that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of users and types of assistive technologies.
Figure 1: WCAG 2.1 AA conformance for DX UIM
List Designer and List View for Performance and Health Management
DX UIM 20.4 CU6 reintroduces a revamped List Designer and List View capability for performance data representation. This feature allows operations teams to create TopN views across hosts/targets or groups for quicker triage. You can represent the information as text, numbers, gauges, alarms, or line graphs.
Figure 2: New List View for TopN reports saved after using List Designer
The List View dashboards are tenant-aware and customizable by role. Any saved List View dashboards can be shared through published URLs for easy access and navigation.
Richer Device Interface View on Operator Console
The Interface view for devices is a rich contextual dashboard to view information on interfaces (utilization, errors, discards, etc.) in the context of a device. With DX UIM 20.4 CU6, the Operator Console presents interface attributes and performance data with seamless navigation.
Figure 3: Interface dashboard provides lots of device details
Higher Control Over Centralized Alarm Policies
Operations teams can control alarm policy creation more effectively with DX UIM 20.4 CU6. As part of our ongoing Zero-Touch monitoring initiatives, alarm policies are automatically created for monitored inventory based on best practices.
While Zero-Touch is advantageous for many operations teams, there are situations where the global admin may want to override and create alarm policies based on their organization’s governance model.
Enhancements also include the ability to allow operators to customize the alarm message as each event is processed.
Enhancements for Stability and Scalability
The release includes the following enhancements for improved stability and scalability:
- NAS has been updated to have maintenance schedules configured so that a secondary NAS can have the same maintenance window schedule to provide for high availability.
- The DX UIM API has been updated to support bulk alarm actions for automation purposes; for more information, refer to the Bulk API Alarm Action section in this uimapi Call Reference article.
- The search function for devices in an existing maintenance schedule has been enhanced to support high-scale inventories common in the modern, hybrid data center (see below for the Search Devices user interface).
Figure 4: Improved search function for updating maintenance schedules
More Convenient Product Usage Insights
From the Operator Console “Settings” icon, users can now seamlessly track product licensing and utilization. This update enables tool administrators and service delivery managers to better utilize, manage, and plan their investments.
Figure 5: New Product Usage insights
Strengthened Security
The DX UIM team, like all Broadcom Software teams, routinely performs proactive penetration testing to identify and remediate vulnerabilities in the various components within the environment. The DX UIM team updated many of the third-party libraries employed by DX UIM 20.4 CU6, including jackson-databind, Spring, Hibernate, dom4j, H2 Database, Oracle Security Developer Toolkit, Oracle PKI (public key infrastructure), and more. Apache Commons Text library has been updated to remediate the Text4shell vulnerability (CVE-2022-42889).
Next Steps
By staying current with DX UIM updates, operations teams can ensure they’re getting the most functionality and security from their solution investments. To learn more about this release, review the DX UIM 20.4 CU6 Release Notes.