SiteScope Release Notes - Releases 8.0.0.0

SiteScope Release Notes - Releases 8.0.0.0 - 8.2.1

Additional Reading

For complete information on deploying, administering, and using Mercury SiteScope, refer to SiteScope Help, available from the following locations:

The Mercury SiteScope 8.2 Disc: sisdocs\doc_lib directory contains the online help system and the sisdocs\pdfs directory contains printer-friendly pdf files of each of the SiteScope Help guides.

SiteScope Help menu, available after installation

Mercury Customer Support Web site

For general information before SiteScope deployment, refer to Getting Started with SiteScope, available from the above locations.

For details on system requirements and installation instructions, refer to the Mercury SiteScope Deployment and Integration Guide, available from the above locations.

For answers to questions not found in the SiteScope Help, check the online Knowledge Base on the Mercury Customer Support Web site.

System Requirements for SiteScope 8.2

Below are the minimum system requirements and recommendations for running SiteScope, based on the various supported operating systems.

System Requirements for Windows


Computer/Processor	Pentium III, 800 MHZ or higher
Operating System	Microsoft Windows 2000 Server SP4, or 2003 Standard/Enterprise SP1
Memory	512 MB minimum (2 GB+ recommended)
Free Hard Disk Space	2 GB or more (10 GB+ recommended)
Web Browser	Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 or later; Firefox 1.0 or later

System Requirements for Solaris


Computer/Processor	Sun 400 MHz UltraSparc II Processor or higher
Operating System	Sun Solaris 8, 9, or 10
Memory	512 MB minimum (2 GB+ recommended)
Free Hard Disk Space	2 GB or more (10 GB+ recommended)
Web Browser	Firefox 1.0 or later

System Requirements for Red Hat Linux


Computer/Processor	Pentium III, 800 MHZ or higher
Operating System	RedHat ES Linux 3.0 or 4.0; RedHat AS Linux 3 or 4 Note: RedHat Linux 9.0 with Native POSIX Threading Library (NPTL) will not be supported after this version of SiteScope.
Memory	512 MB minimum (2 GB+ recommended)
Free Hard Disk Space	2 GB or more (10 GB+ recommended)
Web Browser	Firefox 1.0 or later

SiteScope 8.2.1 Release - June 20, 2006

8.2.1 Bug Fixes

By default, SiteScope reports status per measurements to Mercury Business Availability Center version 6.2 or higher only if thresholds have been defined. If no thresholds have been defined, SiteScope reports status based on the monitor's status and the not the status of the monitor's individual measurements.

The Siebel Log File Monitor now works properly when monitoring a Siebel environment running on a Unix platform.

SiteScope 8.2. Release - June 13, 2006

8.2 Changes and Enhancements

New Monitors:

Web Script - Enables monitoring performance and availability data on Web applications by running scripts recorded in the Mercury Virtual User Generator with the Web protocol and the new Web `Click and Script' protocol. The monitor is supported only on Windows platforms and does not report data to Mercury Business Availability Center.

URL-based monitors - WinInet option introduces an alternative method for executing HTTP/S requests.

Windows Resource Monitor now includes SSH support.

Performance improvements in the new user interface for Global Replace and template deployment.

Siebel Solution Templates are now supported on UNIX:

"No. of Running Sessions" counter where "Tasks in error" is defined.

"Server Running State" counter

Integration with Mercury Business Availability Center version 6.2 or higher includes status per measurement as the default option for sending data to Mercury Business Availability Center.

The Siebel SARM diagnostics tool can now be run using the SARM application from Mercury Business Availability Center using SiteScope. Siebel SARM Diagnostics processes the data that is received by the User Session Trace output files and provides breakdown and comparison data on transactions, user sessions, databases, and Web and application servers (available to Siebel users from version 7.5.3 and higher).

Documentation improvements.

8.2 Bug Fixes

Monitors

Log File Monitor:

Can now match any word even when there is no linefeed code at the end of the file.

Can now match Japanese characters when monitoring EUC encoding log files on Unix (Linux).

Oracle Database Monitor and Oracle Database Solution Template: An exception no longer appears in the Oracle Database Monitor status field due to unavailable counters.

Script Monitor can now match Japanese characters when the script runs on remote Unix (Linux).

Unix Resource Monitor: Fixed a problem where thresholds for counters with the "%" character worked improperly.

Web Service Monitor: It is now possible to reselect WSDL type from WSDL URL to WSDL file.

Directory Monitor: The "last time since modified" counter now presents accurate values.

File Monitor: "No Error if File Not Found" option now works properly. If the option is selected and the file is not found, the monitor status is good regardless of the monitor threshold configuration.

WebSphere Monitor now displays all types of counters correctly.

URL Monitors:

URL and URL Sequence Monitors now support client-side certificate validation using the WinInet option.

'_URLMonitorProxyExceptions' parameter in master.config file now affects all proxy access to URLs.

The Round Trip calculation time is now not added to the download time (and to the total) if the monitor is in error or timeout.

Unauthorized was not reported for particular URL access. This is now fixed by the WinInet option.

The post data option is now supported for all values.

NTLM authentication is now supported for all URL monitors.

Authenticate through an ISA proxy server using Kerberos authentication is now supported when selected the WinInet option.

Siebel Log Monitor now works well with Siebel version 7.8.

IIS Server Monitor in the Siebel Solution Template now displays counters correctly.

The SERVER_DISPLAY_NAME variable in templates now works in Windows.

Fixed the problem of the Windows Resources Monitor refresh changing counters under the "direct registry queries" data collection method.

Active Directory Solution Template: It is now possible to fully deploy the "DS - Core Directory Service" in the template.

WebLogic Application Monitor now shows counters that have spaces in their names.

CPU Monitor now calculates average values of multiple CPU machines correctly.

It is now possible to deploy the Composite Monitor in MSET using the classic user interface.

General

When copying or editing a database alert, the password does not get corrupted.

SMTP NTLM authentication is now supported.

Reports: Reporting Disabled/Enabled status in the management reports now works in the new user interface.

DNS tool: If the DNS Address field is empty, the DNS tool now uses the default DNS server.

Process Pool errors no longer display the username and password in clear text in the error.log file.

Parameters in script alerts are now presented without double quotation marks.

Fixed the problem of a corrupt Dyn file in SiteScope international versions.

Copying configuration files with Chinese characters is now supported.

Mercury Business Availability Center Integration

The FTP Monitor now sends all measurements (status, round trip time, size, match value) to Mercury Business Availability Center.

Restarting SiteScope no longer causes SiteScope profiles to be detached from Monitor Administration.

SiteScope High Availability (Failover)

Improved the error handling of SiteScope High Availability to better recover from errors during the failover synchronization operation.

Failover does not cause monitor settings to be reset.

Fixed a problem when the failover stops reporting to Mercury Business Availability Center if the primary falls down twice without a synchronization operation between the time primary fell twice.

8.2 Limitations

Web Script Monitor

Supported only on Windows platforms.

Can be configured only in the new user interface.

Cannot be deployed using templates.

Cannot create multiple Web Script monitors using the same VuGen script.

Cannot create multiple Web Script monitors using the same VuGen script name even if they reside in different locations.

Transaction names that contain I18N characters are not supported.

When using SiteScope High Availability (Failover), the default location for VuGen scripts cannot be changed. VuGen scripts can be stored either in the default Web script folder created for the Web Script monitor (\SiteScope\templates.webscripts\) or in any network location if the high availability server has permissions to access that location. It cannot be stored in a new default location for scripts configured by a user in General Preferences.

The WinInet option for URL monitors is supported only on Windows platforms.

IIS Server Monitor is unable to display I18N characters in its counters list.

Mercury Business Availability Center version 5.1 customers who use Mercury Business Availability Center for SAP 5.1 should not upgrade their SiteScope to version 8.2. Those customers must first upgrade to Mercury Business Availability Center version 6.1 or higher.

Multiple processes with the same name are not supported for the Windows Resource Monitor.

Views created by server name are not supported.

SiteScope 8.1.2.0 - Feb. 28, 2006

8.1.2.0 Changes and Enhancements

New Monitors:

UDDI Monitor: Designed to perform a search in the UDDI server. For every monitor run, SiteScope checks if the UDDI Server can find a business entity.

Oracle 10G Application Server Monitor: Enables monitoring the availability and performance statistics of an Oracle10g Application Server. The error and warning thresholds for the monitor can be set on one or more Oracle10g server performance statistics.

NetScout Event Monitor: Monitors alerts received from the NetScout nGenius Server and forwards them to Mercury Business Availability Center.

File Monitor now supports monitoring a remote UNIX machine.

Directory Monitor:

Now supports monitoring a remote UNIX machine.

New counter added: first time modified, enabling the monitor to retrieve the earliest modified time of a file in the monitored directory.

E-mails - NTLM authentication support for SMTP mail server, enabling the sending of e-mails over SMTP protocol when the e-mail server requires NTLM authentication.

Upgrade to JRE version 1.5.0_06. This is a minor upgrade that fixes several JRE bugs.

Database Alerts can now contain values that have a ' character in the insert query.

Support of substring and indexOf methods in the EMS configuration file for when creating new and editing existing technology integration monitors.

Cisco Works Monitor and F5 Big-IP Monitor - Added an All MIBs option in the MIB File field, enabling the monitors to search OID in all MIBs and not just in those supplied by SiteScope.

8.1.2.0 Bug Fixes

When the Browse link in the classic interface is accessed to open the browse window, if &xml=true was added in the URL, the XML page of the browse window is now displayed.

Script Alert template now substitutes the errorOnly template property correctly in case there is a new line in the property value. To enable, set the _errorOnlyNewlineFormat property to true in the master.config file.

Counters are now accessible when editing a browsable monitor directly from the Dashboard tab.

Reports Pages are now sizable when they are created from the new interface.

A non admin user can now generate reports.

Fixed the problem of a template variable being replaced with an actual value within the template when that template was being deployed to create a monitor. For example, if a template included a variable in the counters for a browsable monitor, when that template was copy/pasted to create an instance of a browsable monitor and a value was selected for the variable, that value replaced the variable in the template itself.

Fixed the presentation of custom properties in alert templates. Custom properties are now displayed as pairs of key values instead of XML.

Fixed the problem of when creating or moving existing alerts for multiple groups during a standard upgrade resulted in the alert becoming global and affecting all groups and monitors.

When SiteScope is restarted, it exits all open SRVRMG processes.

URL Monitor:

Now monitors through proxy servers.

Now supports NTLM Authentication and NTLM through Proxy.

Script Monitor on Solaris platform: Now able to retrieve values when the response comes back in one line. To enable, add this line to the master.config file: _enable_script_monitor_non_empty_last_line_reading=true.

BMC Metrics Patrol Monitor: The time it takes to access counters for the monitors has been decreased.

URL Sequence Monitor: Fixed the problem of high response times being returned when using HTTPS. The JRE upgrade eliminated the unnecessary retries by NetBios.

Siebel Application Server Monitor: Now supports monitoring Siebel systems with the same Siebel server name but with different Application, Gateway, and Enterprise servers.

Windows Performance Counter Monitor: Now retrieves the correct System/System Up Time value.

WebSphere Monitor: Now supports accessing Websphere JDBC counters for the monitor.

SNMP Trap Monitor: Fixed the problem of an "Address in use" error being returned when SiteScope restarted.

SilverStream Server Monitor: Fixed the process of selecting monitor counters.

Restored support for integration between SiteScope and Mercury LoadRunner. This SiteScope version is compatible with LoadRunner version 8.1 and earlier.

Creation of more than one custom property in the new interface is now supported. Previously, when adding more than one custom property, it was not possible to continue working in the new interface.

Disabling or enabling a monitor directly from the Dashboard tab no longer deletes the monitor's thresholds.

8.1.2.0 Limitations

The new monitors (NetScout, UDDI, and Oracle 10G) are available only from SiteScope Standalone. They are not available while managing the SiteScope in Monitor Administration in Mercury Business Availability Center.

The documentation delivered with 8.1.2.0 has not been completely updated for this service pack. Updated documentation will be released shortly after the release and will be available through a separate download from the Mercury Customer Support site. Documentation for the three new monitors is available in separate .html files in the \sisdocs\doc_lib folder.

URL Monitors: NTLM V2 is not supported while managing the SiteScope in Monitor Administration in Mercury Business Availability Center.

NTLM V2 support for SMTP is not supported while managing the SiteScope in Monitor Administration in Mercury Business Availability Center.

SiteScope 8.1.1.0 - Jan. 25, 2006

8.1.1.0 Changes and Enhancements

Added the SAP Work Processes Monitor. This monitor enables monitoring the effectiveness of your SAP R/3 server configurations, providing statistical information on work process performance.

Added the SAP Java Web Application Server Monitor. This monitor enables monitoring the availability and server statistics for SAP Java Web Application server clusters.

Added the SAP J2EE Solution Template to deploy monitoring for SAP Java Web Application server clusters. Use this solution template to deploy monitors for server-wide resources and metrics.

Updated the SAP R3 Solution Template and added documentation.

Solution Templates for Siebel are now available in the new user interface.

Added HP and AIX support to the Unix Resources Monitor.

8.1.1.0 Bug Fixes

Monitors:

SAP CCMS Monitor: The available counters tree is now more accurate and more similar to the SAP GUI tree.

SNMP Monitor: Now includes the ability to use the + option in Percentage Base properties.

Siebel Web Server Monitor:

Fixed a problem when monitoring failed with servers using SiteMinder authentication.

The monitor can now work with HTML form authentication.

Oracle Monitor: Fixed incorrect counters reported by the Oracle Monitor.

URL Sequence Monitor:

Client side certificates are no longer needed in steps that do not require certificates.

Form submit button is now also included as part of the form properties for the monitor.

URL Monitor:

The HTTP headers of the Open Financial Exchange data now adjust to the specification.

Fix allows overriding the default Accept */* custom header.

Fixed the support for cookies when the domain name starts with a period (.).

Added support for date substitution.

E-Business Transaction Monitor - Sessions are now kept between different steps even if those include URL Monitor.

Fixed the problem of when running SARM in Mercury Business Availability Center, it skewed the numbers in the SS progress page.

Fixed the problem of the content of the solutions templates being duplicated when installing version 8.0.0.3 or 8.1 over version 8.0.0.2 or above.

Fixed a problem in Reports of when a user who is an administrator on a specific group could not view reports that were created on a monitor in that group.

The HistoryUserMail is no longer one of the Format Template options in the main settings for Reports.

The Edit menu option in the Dashboard tab is now in alphabetical order.

8.1.1.0 Limitations

If there are several Windows Media Player monitors running to check streams at regular intervals, upon startup they work, but at some point, all Windows Media Player monitors cease to monitor, with the following error: MMS Replay: Failed to open "mms://64.236.125.4/cnn/nitn/2005/06/18/nitn.edition.01.cnn.ws.wmv" (hr=0x80070002) [MsgId: MERR-17999]. This happens only with Windows Media Player version 9.

Workaround: In the master.config file, set _MediaPlayer9AccountBlocked to true and enter the path of the SiteScope Media Player setting after _MediaPlayer9AccountBlockedDir. (For example, for user paul, enter the following path: C:\\Documents and Settings\\paul\\Local Settings\\Application Data\\Microsoft\\Windows Media\\9.0.)

SiteScope 8.1.0.0 - Dec. 14, 2005

8.1.0.0 Changes and Enhancements

Added I18N, multi-language support for most monitors, including URL monitors.

Added support for creating custom properties in the new user interface.

Added new JMX monitor for monitoring JMX statistics provided by applications adhering to the JMX remoting standard defined in JSR 160. Documentation for this monitor can be found in the following file: <SiteScope root directory>\docs\JMXMon.htm (the help is not yet available from the new user interface, only from the classic interface).

DB2 8.x monitor now configurable from the new user interface.

Added support for reporting to Mercury Business Availability Center a monitor's status per measurement.

Monitor Summary Reports: Added `Thresholds' as an optional field.

Health: Enabled permission management of health monitors through standard group permissions.

URL Monitor: Added a dropdown list for client side certificates.

SNMP by MIB: Added support for selecting an OID from which to start.

Email Reports: Enabled any valid user to view reports by clicking the links in the email. (In previous versions, only a predefined user could view reports through the links in the email.)

8.1.0.0 Bug Fixes

Multi-counter monitors: Problem resolved of editing the counter selection. Now it does not break the report history in Mercury Business Availability Center.

Mercury Business Availability Center Self-Alert Monitor: Restored functionality that was removed in 8.0.0.0.

UNIX Remote Preferences: When using keyfiles, redundant space character removed from the end of the server name.

Templates: Ability to select a server when adding a UNIX Resources Monitor to a template.

Groups: Added support for accessing groups with names ending with period.

Mercury Managed Services Integration: Fixed an error which appeared in the Mercury Business Availability Center registration page after SiteScope was upgraded from earlier versions with Mercury Managed Services registration configured.

Alerts:

Problem resolved with alert test functionality in the new user interface.

Problem resolved of alerts defined on a parent group that contained multiple subgroups and did not fire for all descendant monitors.

Display problem resolved where alerts defined for a subset of monitors in a group were displayed in all descendant monitors.

Monitors:

SNMP by MIB Monitor: Problem resolved where choosing an OID that returned "NULL" caused all OIDS to return "NULL".

Monitor Sets (classic user interface): Problem resolved where deploying an Oracle solution set resulted in a verification exception.

Network Bandwidth Monitor:

Support pound sign (#) in community string field.

Problem resolved of wrong result for average of Fa0/2: % Bandwidth Utilized.

Added link to real-time metrics graphs from the dashboard Tools link.

News Monitor: Support passing authentication credentials to the monitored server.

Web Services Monitor: Problem resolved of failures to parse WSDL files.

URL Content Monitor: Support for sending logical labels of content match counters to Mercury Business Availability Center instead of raw names.

SAP CCMS Monitor: Added ability to set thresholds during monitor creation.

UNIX Resources Monitor: Added support of mount points with long file system names.

URL Sequence Monitor: Problem resolved where detailed measurement response time grew.

Windows Resources Monitor: Added support for counters that contain the back slash (\) character in the instance name.

Solution Templates: Problem resolved of passwords appearing as regular text. Text entered in the password field is now hidden with asterisks.

SiteScope 8.0.3.0 - Nov. 22, 2005

8.0.0.3 Changes

Dashboard Performance:

Support for editing monitors and groups from a monitor or group's actions.

Support for disabling all of a group's monitors recursively. This option is now supported in the new user interface.

Support for disabling all alerts associated with a selected group without disabling the alert itself. This option is now supported in the new user interface.

Monitors

Web Sphere Monitor: Support for Web Sphere 6.0 in addition to the existing Web Sphere monitor.

DB2 8.x Monitor: Support for DB2 version 8.x was added. For information on configuring this monitor, refer to the DB28Mon.htm file in the <SiteScope root directory>/docs directory.

Oracle Database Monitor: Cached connections by the Oracle Database monitor to improve monitor scalability.

Log File Monitor: When a Log File monitor is running against a file on a remote UNIX machine using SSH connection, SiteScope's memory usage could increase significantly, depending on the growth of the monitored file. A new option was added to retrieve the file line by line into a local temporary file, and then to process it line by line from the temporary file, thus reducing memory usage. To use this option add the setting _logFileMonitorCacheToFile=true to the monitor's frame in the .mg file for a single monitor; to the group's frame for all the Log File monitors in a group; and to the master.config file for all Log File monitors. This option is recommended when the monitored file greatly increases between runs, causing memory resource issues on the SS JVM. The default option, without adding this setting, is to retrieve the remote file as a whole.

New User Interface

Support for greater flexibility in customizing specific layouts of the new SiteScope user interface, enabling users to return to the required page without having to navigate. For example, if a user selects a node in the monitor tree and a view from the configured views, when returning to the saved layout, the page displays the same selected node and the same selected view. The following lists the available layout options:

Tabs: Dashboard, Contents, Properties, Log Files, Global Replace

Node in the main monitor tree

View

Dashboard Views: Detailed or Icon

Dashboard Hierarchy options: child groups and monitors, all descendant monitors

Dashboard Favorite available options: Errors Only, Errors and Warnings, All Objects

User-defined Dashboard Favorites

Support for saving page layouts with the new Page Option menu, including the following options:

Add to Favorites creates a bookmark that takes you directly to the current layout and includes all layout parameters. When using Internet Explorer, the Add to Favorite dialog box opens with the URL. When using Mozilla, it reloads the current page, updates the address bar with the URL, and notifies the user to use the bookmark feature.

Save Layout to User Preferences associates the current layout with the logged-in user. When the current user logs in again, the page opens with the saved layout.

General

Buffer size used by SSH can now be configured by editing the master.config property _sshBufferSize file to change the default buffer size of 1024. This is relevant for log file monitors over SSH when the log file contains very large lines.

Old User Interface

MMS tab was removed.

Bug Fixes

The Script Monitor reports no data only for exit codes less than 0. Previously, it reported no data when the script had a non-zero exit code.

The monitor runs when defined by a UNIX remote machine based on HTTP connection. Previously, the monitor failed to run.

A UNIX System Monitor with a "%" sign in its counter will now give the correct status when its threshold is set. Previously, setting the threshold on a counter with this sign caused the monitor to get a wrong status.

The Composite Monitor no longer reports that one of its monitors is in error if the real monitor status is good. Previously this monitor may have reported an error even if the real status was good.

Schedules can be updated from the old user interface. Previously was not going into effect.

Custom headers are now being sent for URL monitors.

SiteScope is now restarting on Solaris and Linux.

Non-administrator users are now able to see the log files from the within the browser.

All of the log preferences properties are now being stored properly.

The monitor description report now displays monitors of sub groups.

All of the alert options are now taking affect from the old user interface.

SiteScope 8.0.0.2 - Oct. 17, 2005

8.0.0.2 Changes

Dashboard Performance: The performance of the dashboard views in the new user interface was improved significantly, reducing the time and resources required when working with the new UI. Improvements were made both on the SiteScope server and for the client browser side. Since the dashboard refreshes itself every minute by default, this affects overall performance. This change should be most noticeable in deployments with large numbers of monitors.

SAP Monitor: The SAP Monitor type that was removed in 8.0 release has been re-factored and re-implemented in this release. SAP Monitor instances deployed in a version of SiteScope prior to 8.0.0.0 can be imported to this version.

Custom Monitor Properties: Support for user-defined custom monitor properties has been added to the new user interface. This allows custom properties to be added to edit/add Properties page in the new interface. Custom properties continue to be supported as before in the Classic UI. A new section describing how to use this feature is added to the help documentation. See the Advanced Monitor Options section of the SiteScope help for details.

Custom Columns: Support for a custom column was added to dashboard views in the new interface. Custom columns are supported as before in the Classic UI. A new section describing how to use this feature is added to the help documentation. See the Advanced Monitor Options section of the SiteScope help for details.

SiteScope Classic Interface: Fixed a bug where group descriptions that contained special HTML markup characters were breaking the display of the parent group page in the SiteScope Classic interface.

SiteScope New Interface and SSL: Eliminated a `Non Secure Content' message that was displayed when using SSL with the new SiteScope interface. When the SiteScope server was configured to use SSL, the browser was displaying a warning dialog complaining about non-secure items in the page. This behavior has been eliminated.

E-mail Preferences: Fixed a problem with mail preferences to enable user authentication to an SMTP server. Previously, using a username/password for the SMTP mail authentication required adding entries to the master.config file. A bug was introduced where these settings were ignored. This patch fixes that problem and adds new fields for entering these settings in the Mail Preferences Properties view. An SMTP response timeout setting has also been added to the UI.

SiteScope URL: A change was made to simplify access to new SiteScope interface. With this change, requesting the root SiteScope URL of the form http://<sitescope_host>:<port_for_new_UI>/ will automatically redirect to the main page or login screen for the new interface. The default port number for the new UI is 8080.

Oracle Solution Template: Fixed a problem where the Oracle solution template failed to deploy properly using the Classic UI. The action would produce a page displaying an exception error. The Solution would be deployed, however 10 monitors would be missing. A change to the solution template files fixed this problem.

Oracle Database Monitor: Fixed a problem in the Oracle Database Monitor where counter browse tree would become corrupted. When configuring the Oracle Database monitor from Mercury Business Availability Center, the user would see a browse tree with only a few nodes. This was caused by SiteScope using a cached version of the browse tree that was corrupted. This patch makes changes so that SiteScope will no longer save the corrupted tree.

Siebel Application Server Monitor: Fixes were made to the Task List for Siebel Monitor. The BAC4Siebel transaction breakdown issues were solved. Data incompatibility between SiteScope and BAC was fixed.

Global Search and Replace: Improved the Global Search and Replace (GSAR) performance for the Network Bandwidth Monitor. Before this change, when performing GSAR operations on a Network Bandwidth monitor, SiteScope would verify: all the properties of the monitor, which could be a long operation. With this change, only the changed properties are verified.

Mercury Application Mapping Monitor: Fixed a problem where the Mercury Application Mapping Monitor (MAM) would fail to send all samples to Business Availability Center (BAC).

Mercury Business Availability Center Integration: A change was made so that a user with the name "Flipper" is no longer created automatically when importing SiteScope to Business Availability Center (BAC).

Alerts: Fixed a problem where alerts were not firing correctly when they were configured to run "After all monitors in this group are in error". Also fixed a bug where group alerts were not firing for monitors that are 2 or more levels deeper in the monitor tree relative to the alert definition.

Documentation: The online documentation library and printer-friendly documents were updated in this release.

SiteScope 8.0.0.1 - Sep. 8, 2005

8.0.0.1 Changes

Solution Templates: Three solution templates were added for use with the user interface for

the following environments:

Microsoft Active Directory

Microsoft Exchange servers

Oracle database

Other solution templates continue to be available using the SiteScope Classic interface.

Note: Solution templates added with this patch can be edited using the new interface. However, users should not make changes to the configuration of the solution templates because the templates will be overwritten by installing future versions of SiteScope.

UI Performance: Improvements were made in the new user interface in the following areas:

For server based monitors, the edit page no longer tries to get all the available servers from the network.

The Global Search and Replace page performance was improved.

Reports fixes:

Fixed a problem when using a non-administrator account in the old UI, SiteScope did not show management reports and failed to generate quick reports.

Fixed a problem where reports were showing detailed information for the monitors when these options were not selected. This caused the reports to be much bigger than intended.

Windows Resources Monitor: The Windows Resources Monitor (WRM) was experiencing a scalability problem where an error on one monitor instance would propagate to many other WRM instances in a SiteScope installation. The dependency that caused these false errors was traced back to the Microsoft PDH library, which SiteScope uses to retrieve data within a Windows Resources Monitor. This patch is designed to eliminate the error while providing a scalable solution for Windows monitoring.

Global Search and Replace: Fixed a problem when updating some alerts or schedule properties using the Global Search and Replace feature could cause other properties of the selected objects to be lost.

Composite Monitor: Fixed a problem with the Composite Monitor when it contained Log File monitors. In some cases the monitor would show the subordinate Log File monitor as in error even though the Log File Monitor was set to never be in error. The problem only occurs when the Composite monitor runs while the subordinate Log File monitor is still in the process of running. The Composite monitor did not correctly account for the status of the Log File monitor in this case.

URL monitors: Made changes to HTTPClient to check the protocol as well as the host if redirected by a URL request. Before this change, SiteScope would check if a previous connection existed and only if the host was the same on the redirect request. In some cases, the host would be that same but the connection would change from HTTP (port 80) to HTTPS (port 443). Before this change, SiteScope would continue to use the previous connection which would result in response code 302 errors.

URL monitors:

Made a change to the HTTPClient used by URL monitor types to reinstate automated handling of multiple cookies on the same line. This functionality was inadvertently lost with the implementation of the HTTPClient in SiteScope 7.9.5. This change processes cookie data entered in the POST Data field for URL and URL Sequence monitors so that it will be correctly handled by the HTTPClient.

Made changes to the HTTPClient used by URL monitor types to correct problems in the calculation of measurement times in requesting and retrieving URLs. In some cases the calculated round trip time was less than the sum of the detailed measurements. In some cases, the download time was erroneously reported as zero even though the actual time was greater than zero. This patch includes changes to improve the calculation of the round trip time and detailed measurements.

Fixed a problem where the response time for URL monitor types was too large in reports. The DNS Connect Response and Download times need to be initialized on each request, because the connection may stay open on multiple requests if the host stays the same. The ResponseDuration was growing on multiple requests, since the connect only happened once, but the connect time was staying fixed.

Navigation: Made a change so that if the user requests an invalid URL for the SiteScope server (for example, http://localhost:8080/sitescope) a link to the correct SiteScope address is displayed. The correct address has the form http://localhost:8080/SiteScope.

Alerts: Fixed a problem in the SiteScope Classic user interface where alerts could not be defined when using the "Initial alert after..." option.

BMC Patrol Event Monitor: Some changes were made to the settings for the BMC Patrol Event Monitor. The documentation for the monitor is no longer accurate. For the latest documenation, refer to the Mercury Business Availability Center Documentation Library for version 6.0.

Integration Monitors: A Web Services Monitor type has been added to the selection of integration monitors. The documentation for this monitor is available only in the Mercury Business Availability Center Documentation Library for version 6.0.

SiteScope 8.0.0.0 - Aug. 1, 2005

Note: SiteScope 8.0 includes most of the changes made available as patch releases to SiteScope 7.9.5. Some changes are not included in this release. Review these release notes and contact Mercury Customer Support if you have questions about upgrading to version 8.0.

Highlights in 8.0.0.0

SiteScope user interface: This release introduces a new user interface with many changes in the user model and display elements. Features in the new interface include:

a new hierarchical monitor tree menu with new icons you use to navigate, edit and manage monitors and configurations

new dashboard views for real-time monitor status and additional filtering options

new properties view for editing group and monitor configurations

new contents view for managing groups and monitors

metric level status detail for monitors that measure multiple counters or metrics

connection availability status for monitors to indicate if an error is due to a threshold trigger or an inability to connect with a remote system

The new user interface is configured to answer at http://<sitescope_host>:8080/SiteScope. The original SiteScope interface, now referred to as the SiteScope Classic interface, continues to be available on the default port 8888.

Monitor Templates: A new template mechanism is introduced as a tool for rapid deployment of monitor configurations. Templates extend the Monitor Set feature in the SiteScope Classic interface with additional capabilities including:

configuration of multiple groups and subgroups

configuration of alerts for groups and monitors

configuration of application monitor types that use dynamic measurement selection

access to SiteScope remote server lists as variables

import and export functionality

The new templates are only available in the new SiteScope interface.

Global Replace: A new search and replace utility is added in the new SiteScope interface. This feature enables administrators to change and update configurations globally or across multiple elements in one operation. The scope of the replace operation can be controlled by context and the selection of specific types of objects such as monitor and alert type.

View filtering: The new SiteScope interface includes a view definition feature that enables the creation of named views for filtering the objects displayed in the interface. Views are displayed per client request so different users can use different views simultaneously .

Element Categories: The new SiteScope interface includes an element categorization feature that enables administrators to define named categories and assign one or more categories as an attribute of individual monitors, groups and other elements. This is useful to distinguish elements in the infrastructure based on class, priority, ownership, configuration status, or other criteria. Category settings can be used as a filter criteria for views.

Unix Resources Monitor: A new monitor type has been added for monitoring multiple system resources on remote Unix servers.

Windows Services State Monitor: A new monitor type has been added for monitoring lists of running services on remote Windows servers and reporting when the number of running services changes.

XML Metrics Monitor: A new monitor type has been added for flexibly monitoring information served in XML format such as Web Services.

8.0.0.0 Limitations

SiteScope 8.0 must be installed in a new directory structure. Do not install SiteScope 8.0 into the same directory structure as any previous version of SiteScope. You can use the Copy Monitor Configurations utility to upgrade earlier version of SiteScope to version 8.0. You access the Copy Monitor Configurations utility using the SiteScope Classic interface after installation.

SiteScope 8.0 new user interface limitations: There are several configuration actions that are not available in the new SiteScope interface . The following must be performed using the SiteScope Classic interface:

integration with Mercury Business Availability Center

integration with Mercury Managed Services

integration with Mercury SiteSeer

configuration of the Mercury Self-Alert Monitor

Multi-view panel actions

viewing the Progress report page

integration with transaction recorder scripts

SiteScope 8.0 requires a new license key. The general license key for earlier versions of SiteScope can not be used to operate SiteScope 8.0. Contact your Mercury sales representative to obtain updated licensing.

SiteScope Health: The monitors used for SiteScope server health monitoring are configured by default. If these monitors are edited or deleted for some reason, they may only be restored by using the SiteScope Classic interface

Solution Templates: SiteScope solution templates can not be deployed using the new SiteScope interface. The templates can be deployed using the SiteScope Classic interface. Access the SiteScope Classic interface, navigate to the group into which you want to deploy the solution template and click the Solution Template link on the group detail page. Once the monitors in the solution template are deployed, they can be viewed and managed using the new interface.

Copy Configurations: The Copy Monitor Configurations utility for upgrading a new SiteScope 8.0 installation with configuration data from an existing data does not copy all files that may be needed to duplicate the source SiteScope installation. Files that are not copied by the utility include:

Integration monitor configuration files used for communicating data to Mercury Business Availability Center

middleware files used to provide connectivity between SiteScope and external databases and other applications

custom monitor files

server keystore and certificate files See SiteScope Deployment and Integration in the Documentation Library for more information.

8.0.0.0 New Features and Additions

XML Transform Tool: A tool has been added for testing XSLT transformations of XML data. This tool can be used with the new XML Metrics Monitor type to test and troubleshoot transformation of data from Web service enabled applications.

SiteScope Interface: The new SiteScope 8.0 interface is served using Apache Tomcat. The administration of the server for port changes, access control lists, and SSL configuration is done using the SiteScope\Tomcat\conf\server.xml file.
Note: The SiteScope Classic interface is served by SiteScope's internal Web server in parallel to the new interface. To secure access to SiteScope, you need to configure security settings for both Web servers.

SiteScope Configuration Data Storage: A new data storage mechanism for SiteScope monitor and other configuration data is implemented in SiteScope 8.0. This mechanism is used as the primary source of configuration data in SiteScope. Additions and changes made using the SiteScope interface are recorded directly to this data store and, by default, to the configuration files as used by previous SiteScope versions. However, not all configuration information is duplicated to the older configuration files. Administrators need to include the <sitescope_install_path>\SiteScope\persistency directory when backing up SiteScope configuration data.

User Documentation: The SiteScope documentation has been changed significantly. The changes include:

the SiteScope documentation set has been divided and reorganized into a Documentation Library

the online documentation is now presented using an HTML based help applet which supports word search

printer-friendly versions of each book in the Documentation Library are included

support for the previous HTML-based help documentation set used with the SiteScope Classic interface has been discontinued

Monitor Dependency: A new optional setting is added to prevent SiteScope from running a monitor whenever a second monitor with a dependency set to the first monitor changes status to error. Monitors that are dependent on another monitor being ok will cause SiteScope to run that other monitor if the status of the dependent monitor changes to error. Adding the setting _runOkDependsOnError=false to the master.config file will change the behavior to not run the dependence controlling monitor. For example: Monitor B is set to depend on Monitor A as Ok. By default, if Monitor B goes into error, SiteScope runs Monitor A. With _runOkDependsOnError=false in the master.config file, if Monitor B goes into error, SiteScope does not run Monitor A.

SAP CCMS Alert Monitor: A new monitor type is added to support monitoring of SAP CCMS alert systems. This monitor type requires that SiteScope be configured as an agent reporting to Mercury Business Availability Center and an SAP option license be entered on the SiteScope machine. Contact Mercury Customer Support for more information about this monitor type.

URL monitors: Added support for defining a single proxy for use with all URL monitor types. The following settings were added in the SiteScope master.config file to globally define default proxy settings for URL monitors: _proxy=, _proxyUserName=, and _proxyPassword=.

Disk Space Monitor: The Disk Space Monitor now has a property called <mountName> that is accessible for use with alert templates. This is only applicable when monitoring remote Unix servers.

Remote SSH monitoring: Added SSH keyboard authentication mode for use with the internal Java SSH client.

WebLogic Monitor: The WebLogic JMX Monitor has been redesigned to improve stability and add some new features, including the ability to reliably time-out a WebLogic Monitor run. The monitor now runs in its own Java process on the SiteScope machine and the applicable client software is no longer competing with SiteScope for system resources.

SSL certificates: Added an HTTP SSL Client Side Certificate loading tool found at: SiteScope/tools/ClientSideCertTool.zip. This enables a Certificate Administrator to bundle a certificate and the certPassword into a password encrypted file for use by the SiteScope Administrator. Changed SiteScope to decrypt the file and use the certificate in the URL Monitor. Added a drop down menu for selecting the client-side certificate in the URL Monitor. Also added a password field for the certificate or the bundled certificate. You may select the certificate directly if you have it, or a bundled cert. Put client-side certificate into the SiteScope/templates.certificates directory.

IPMI Monitor: Added support for Dell 1850 series servers. These servers implement discrete counters in a slightly different way.

8.0.0.0 Changes

The JRE used by SiteScope was upgraded to version 1.5.

SAP Monitor: The SAP Monitor type has been deprecated in SiteScope 8.0 and is no longer included with the product .

URL monitors: Fixed a problem where the response time for URL monitor types was too large in reports. The DNS Connect Response and Download times need to be initialized on each request, because the connection may stay open on multiple requests if the host stays the same. The ResponseDuration was growing on multiple requests, since the connect only happened once, but the connect time was staying fixed.

SiteScope Classic User Interface: Added performance improvements for user interface operations. This change will most noticeable affect SiteScope installations with a large number of groups configured. This change implemented a fundamentally different method for looking up group information.

URL monitors: Made a change to allow SiteScope URL monitor types to request, accept and process HTML pages received as compressed (zipped) archive files. Some Web servers can zip HTML pages in order to improve file transfer time to the requesting client. With this change, SiteScope can be enabled to send Accept-Encoding: gzip and check for Content-Encoding: gzip in HTTP headers. This option is enabled globally by adding the setting _urlOtherHeader=Accept-Encoding: gzip to the master.config file. In this case, SiteScope will include the Accept-Encoding: gzip string with all URL request headers. This same setting can be added to monitor group files to limit it use to a group of monitors or a single monitor.

URL Sequence Monitor: Fixed a problem with the monitor so that it respects the Retries setting in the Advanced Options section. Before the change the URL Sequence Monitor was hard coded to always do 3 retries if a URL failed even though the default in the user interface was set to 0 (zero) retries. Before this change, the Retries setting in the monitor setup screen had no effect on the number of retries performed by the monitor.

Siebel Application Server Monitor: Made a change to the Siebel Application Server Monitor that adds filtering on tasks reported as Error or Completed. Running tasks are displayed regardless of their starting time. Before this change, the Siebel Monitor would filter tasks based on their starting time (60 minutes by default).

Siebel Application Server Monitor: Fixed a problem where the monitor would generate an error while parsing Task lines if the lines overflow. A change was made so that parsing is done differently and parsing of line overflow is prevented.

URL Sequence Monitor: Corrected a problem where the authentication and cookie data from one sequence step were being passed to the next step of the sequence. This could result in incorrect requests to the monitored systems. With this change, user name and password information are only used on requests for the step they are entered on.

Script Monitor: SiteScope allows a Script Alert to be configured such that some additional arguments may be passed on the script's command line when it is invoked. Before this change, if a Script Alert was configured to use a timeout with the _scriptMonitorTimeout setting in master.config, any extra parameters were not properly quoted on the command line to the script. This change corrects the problem so that extra arguments are now available in Script Alerts when they are configured to use a timeout value.

Network Bandwidth Monitor: The Network Bandwidth Monitor previously did not do any sanity check of the data it was reporting. In some rare cases, SiteScope can intermittently report unreasonably large network bandwidth statistics or incorrect counter values. This change adds some logic to detect when the collected data is likely outside of a range of reasonable values, which will trigger another reading of the data. If more than one bad reading is made, the monitor will return a reading of n/a instead of reporting questionable data values.

User Permissions: Fixed a problem with group filtering associated with user permissions. Prior to this change, when a user account was configured to show only part of the monitor group hierarchy, subgroups within the permitted groups were not displayed correctly to the user when selecting groups for reports.

WebSphere Performance Servlet Monitor: Fixed a problem where the password field on the WebSphere Performance Servlet Monitor was being displayed in plain text. The field is now encoded.

WebLogic Monitor: Corrected logic used for displaying the Secure Server checkbox for the WebLogic Monitor. This fixes a problem where the monitor would be displayed as if it were configured as a secure server even though the user had selected that it was not.

WebLogic Monitor: WebLogic monitors now will use a separate process for getting data associated with configuring a monitor. Previously these monitors used the same process for running and configuring the monitor. This fix should improve performance when adding or editing WebLogic Monitors to a SiteScope installation which already has many WebLogic Monitors running.

URL Monitor: If a URL is returned with an HTTP code 302 error status from HTTP server with no response Location: header or meta refresh, then the monitor will check for a path with a filename on the end, drop the filename and use just the path for the address for the redirect. For example, when monitoring the URL: http://www.abcd.com/index/image.html, if the server responds with an HTTP code 302 with above response conditions, then the monitor will retry using the following URL: http://www.abcd.com/index/

URL Monitor: Fixed a problem with handling the Proxy Server User Name field under the Advanced Options section of the URL Monitor. Previously, if the Proxy Server User Name string included a backslash it was currently split into NTLM domain and user name. This caused problems because there are users that require the use of a backslash. With this fix, double backslashes are replaced with a single backslash and the domain and user are left together in the Proxy Server User Name field. For example, when the user enters domainname\\username, the result is processed as domainname\username. If only a single backslash is included, then the domain and user are split internally. The domain and user remain as the user entered them in the GUI.

General: Made changes to monitor group behavior when alerts are enabled or disabled for the group. Previously, SiteScope would schedule all monitors in the group to be run whenever the alerts for the monitors in the group were changed from an enabled state or disabled state. This was not logical could result in too many monitor unnecessary monitor runs. With this change the monitors are not scheduled to be run if the alert enable/disable state is changed.

Siebel Application Server Monitor: Added an optional setting that can be used to limit the number of processes SiteScope can use to monitor Siebel Server Manager (svrmgr) processes. If SiteScope runs too many simultaneous Siebel processes, the SiteScope server can get process errors, or the target Siebel server may become overloaded. This may happen if there are several Siebel Application Server monitors running frequently. To enable this feature, add the _maxSiebelProcesses setting to the master.config file. The default value is 40.

NOTE: The number of processes added with the _maxSiebelProcesses settings is in addition to the monitor process limit set with the _maxMonitorProcesses setting. This to say that maximum monitor processes running = maxMonitorProcesses + maxSiebelProcesses

General: Made changes to improve performance of the SiteScope Classic user interface when logged in as a restricted access SiteScope user. When a user has permission to see only some groups, the display of the user interface was drastically slower than when all groups are allowed for the user. Changes were made to improve the UI performance when groups are restricted.

Manage Monitors: Fixed an problem to enable users to correctly move a monitor with more than one alert assigned to it. Previously an action to move a monitor with multiple alerts assigned at the monitor level would result in an error.

SNMP by MIB Monitor: Made changes to remove HTML markup from property names in the SNMP by MIB Monitor. This was done to resolve problems in LoadRunner.

BAC Monitor Administration Integration: Fixed a problem where Monitor Administration in Mercury Business Availability Center might corrupt SiteScope monitor configurations. This might happen when a user selects to view the properties of a monitor but does not edit or update the monitor configuration.

URL monitors: Changed the HTTPClient to keep connections open across multiple URL requests. This change was needed to support URL monitoring of servers that use the SSL session ID to identify ongoing communication with SiteScope.

BAC Monitor Administration Global Replace: Fixed a problem when using the Global Replace in Business Availability Center Monitor Administration. The problem occurred when requesting a change to monitor configurations without selecting to change the monitor description field.

WebLogic Monitor: Made changes to the WebLogic Monitor in order to enable monitoring of more recent WebLogic servers using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). Several new settings have been added to the WebLogic Monitor's connection properties. The monitor type can now be run using a Java VM other than the JVM used to run SiteScope. See below near the bottom of this file for more information.

WebLogic Monitor: Created new command line arguments that SiteScope can pass to the Java process used for the WebLogic Monitor. These optional arguments are applied globally for all WebLogic monitor instances and can be used to tune the separate Java process. See the section Configuring SiteScope to Use T3 Over SSL Against a WebLogic Server below for more information.

SAP Monitor: Fixed a problem where the SAP Monitor returned zero values for certain counters, including the Table Scan & fetches counters. Also some counters (for example, Time statistics - Sessions busy and Shared Pool - reloads/pins) were returning the wrong values.

URL Sequence Monitor: Fixed a problem with the URL Sequence Monitor where the *.dyn files for the monitor would grow with each run.

SAP and DB2 Monitors: Fixed a defect in the SAP and DB2 monitors where measurement values were rounded improperly. For example, a measurement of 0.057 was displayed as 0.57.

Custom Monitors: Fixed a problem where Monitor Administration in Mercury Application Management (BAC) was not looking in the correct location for possible Custom monitors.

Database Counter Monitor: Fixed a problem where after doing a Refresh of the Database Counter Monitor the database connection was not being closed.

URL monitor types: Made changes to map detailed error messages from the HTTPClient to messages used previously in SiteScope. SiteScope uses simple messages for typical URL problems.

Remote Windows SSH monitoring: Corrected a defect in which Remote Windows monitors working through SSH fail when accessed using the Monitor Administration interface. If a Remote Windows server is added initially as a SSH type, all associated monitors will fail trying to access the host remote:<nthostname>. This problem does not occur if the server is changed to SSH from a NetBIOS type.

URL Content Monitor: Fixed a problem with XML matching which would return match0 match0 when it should have returned the error match XML field value.

Alert templates: Added support for reporting counters in warning counters in alert templates by using a new tag: <warningOnly>. This functionality is parallel to capability of reporting counters in error using the <errorOnly> tag in alert templates. To enable this functionality:

Add the _errorOnly=true setting to the master.config file.

Edit an alert template file to include the new <warningOnly> tag.

Define an alert to use the edited template file.

URL monitor types: Fixed a problem with URL monitor types where host header information was not being handled correctly for URLs using port addresses other than port 80 or port 443. Previously, the port number may have been omitted from the header information.

Business Availability Center Integration: Fixed a problem with top-level-group configuration changes in Business Availability Center. This change should also prevent duplicate monitor data samples and future data samples from being sent from some Integration Monitor types.

SAP CCMS Monitor: Made changes to add other counter quality measurements for Topaz reporting. The SAP CCMS monitor has quality indications added for each counter reported to Topaz, not just for the entire monitor run. Also fixed a problem where adding a new counter to an existing monitor caused the new counters to be displayed without a "unit of measure" designations in the status on the monitor groups page.

Manage Page: Fixed a problem where monitor management functions would fail to operate when a large number of monitors are selected. For example, if you filtered the Manage Monitors page by Monitor Type and the resulting page had a very large number of monitors displayed on it (greater than 100), then the Disable, Enable, Copy, Refresh, etc. actions at the bottom of the page would not make any changes to the selected monitors.

URL Monitor: Fixed support for client-side certificates in URL monitors. Client Side Certs must go in SiteScope/templates.certificates. There is no longer a NT Challenge option for these monitor types.

URL Monitors: Fixed a problem where URL monitors were not honoring the _URLMonitorProxyExceptions setting. URLs with hosts listed in this setting were still going through proxies.

URL Content Monitor: Fixed a problem with the average values in reports: The first match value was not showing an average value in the reports.

URL monitors were sending Accept-Charset headers with the default machine encoding. Some servers would not respond correctly to these types of requests. This was occurring with charset=Cp1252 appended to Content-Type: header.

Windows Counter Monitor: Fixed a problem with Windows Counter Monitor not being able to monitor a specific instance of a process through the naming convention processname#2.

Static HTML pages: Static HTML page error messages were appearing at the top of each HTML page. These errors are now going to standard error.

Windows Event Log Monitor: Fixed problem with Windows Event Log Monitor. The monitor was not populating properties that contained details on the particular event that was found. The monitor was also failing to fire alerts for each event matched.

SiteScope Authentication with BAC 5.1: Added support to allow login to SiteScope with any user without specifying the account in the URL. Existing behavior was to either to allow only the administrator account to login if no account was specified in the URL or to allow only the account that was specified in the URL. This change adds an option to specify that the login should allow any account to which valid credentials are provided. It is activated by specifying sitescopeGenericLogin as the account in the URL. When this is the account that is passed in, the authentication dialog allows login with any valid username and password. This change allows BAC to access the SiteScope UI without requiring the user to provide the administrator login to SiteScope.
A parallel patch was cr