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Key Takeaways
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DX Unified Infrastructure Management (DX UIM) is a powerful solution that enables comprehensive infrastructure observability across your digital ecosystems, including private, public, and hybrid clouds. With DX UIM, you can proactively and efficiently manage the performance and availability of your IT infrastructure and applications.
DX UIM 20.4 is the current main branch of the solution. This release offers a number of significant capabilities that weren’t available in earlier versions. Here are a few key enhancements:
- Major usability improvements, such as enhanced access control and zero-touch onboarding of configurations and alarm policies. The release also features improved inventory management, personalization, dashboards, and reporting.
- Reintroduction of List View Designer, Performance Reports Designer, and Metric View Designer. These features enable you to create custom, on-the-fly reports and schedule them for delivery.
- Expansion of public cloud coverage, such as support for Google Cloud Platform services.
- DevSecOps enhancements, such as secure development strategies and tactics, third-party vulnerability testing, and enterprise-grade secure toolsets.
- Comprehensive defect fixes, stability improvements, and performance optimizations across all layers of deployment.
DX UIM 20.4 Cumulative Update 9 (CU9) is the latest patch release. It includes some new features and enhancements, security updates, and defect fixes. The sections below detail a few of these new capabilities.
Enhanced annotations for improved triage through alarms
The Alarms console now displays pre-configured, custom headers to enhance triage in the Operator console. You can view the recent annotation in the Overview tab of the Alarms console. When you edit an existing annotation, you can view the history of the annotations with a timestamp. Users can also filter alarms based on custom headers and annotations.
Figure 1: Annotations on the Alarms view
Enhanced security around monitored data collection
Encrypt password in SQL Server probe test connection
The current version of the SQL Server probe uses an industry-standard AES 256 encryption algorithm to encrypt passwords for enhanced security. By default, weaker encryption algorithms like AES 128 and Twofish are not supported.
API enhancements
The current release includes the UIMAPI 20.4.9 and supports parameter encryption for the dirscan, sql_response, and rsp probes to automate monitoring workflows securely.
Figure 2: Encrypted parameter for probe through DX UIM APIs
Securing Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) connectivity
DX UIM relies on the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) Remote Protocol to utilize WMI for tasks like discovery, remote robot installation, and remote device metric retrieval. Microsoft's security enhancements now mandate RPC_C_AUTHN_LEVEL_PKT_INTEGRITY authentication. Failure to meet this authentication level on the client machine may result in issues in connecting with the DX UIM server using WMI through DCOM. In other words, DCOM authentication hardening should be enabled at both ends (not partially) for the functionalities to work without issues.
Support for OpenSSL 3.x
With the current release, DX UIM and monitoring probes support OpenSSL 3.x. This change enhances connection speed and security.
Inventory Viewer improved for high-scale inventory
The Inventory screen of the Operator console has been enhanced with respect to scalability, memory utilization, and rendering time. Compared to previous versions, the latest Inventory view consumes less than one-third of the memory requirement. In addition, the rendering time is improved and is near constant against the size of the inventory.
Figure 3: Improved Inventory view
MCS enhancements to improve speed and governance
MCS remote policies now offer enhanced processing efficiency, resulting in improved deployment time. In addition, the MCS profile deployment dashboard overview now includes contextual filtering for more efficient operations and enhanced data privacy across operators.
Figure 4: MCS profile deployment dashboard
Performance Reports Designer (PRD) enhancements
The release includes the following enhancements to PRD:
- When enabled, the auto-refresh option keeps the PRD updated with the most recent data and updates the graph accordingly. You can toggle this option on or off as needed.
- Interpolation helps estimate the samples when the aggregation selected in the chart is less than the actual polling interval of the probe. By default, interpolation is disabled, but you can easily enable it per your requirements.
Figure 5: Data interpolation support in PRD
Conclusion
By upgrading to DX UIM 20.4 CU9, you can benefit from the solution’s latest features and enhancements. You can also ensure that your infrastructure is monitored with the most up-to-date and secure probes and packages.
If you want to learn more about DX UIM 20.4 CU 9, you can view full documentation or the release notes. In addition, Broadcom support offers a pre-upgrade review program to help ensure a smooth transition. To get started, review the DX UIM Upgrade Guide and Pre-Planning Checklist for 20.4.
Ashish Aggarwal
Ashish is a seasoned product management leader with extensive experience in the enterprise software industry, specializing in observability solutions. As a lead product manager, Ashish spearheads the modernization of ingestion processes for DX Operational Observability and oversees Infrastructure Observability,...
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