March 2022 Newsletter
Welcome to our support newsletter!
Spring has finally arrived, but some places this year have still been cold. Regardless, the team has still been busy and this month’s newsletter highlights some of our recent updates.
Missed an earlier Newsletter? Previous newsletters are located here.
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In addition to the support newsletter, be sure to follow us on your favorite social media channel, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. We provide product-related updates, pertinent articles, webinars, and videos there. This newsletter is targeted at existing customers and provides general product-related updates. There is still a lot more to know about us!
Updates
Announcing the immediate availability of Navigator 10.4
The latest release of Navigator, available now, includes two major milestone developments - the next generation of the Web Security Manager (apodwsm) and Navigator for Solace PubSub+.
Web Security Manager
The most important thing to mention here is that you can continue to use apodwsm with 10.4. You do not have to use the new web application, navxwsm. We did this to make the transition easier. They are fully interchangeable, so you can use either one or both. That way, you can document the updated processes for managing your security environment. Navxwsm uses the AutoPilot environment for security, not Apache Tomcat users as apodwsm does, so even though you can log into both, you may be using a different credential mechanism.
Navigator for Solace PubSub
Expanding the Integration Infrastructure covered across the entire Navigator X portfolio, we have added Solace PubSub+ to the administrative interface. This release was prioritized for automated usage as part of a CI/CD pipeline, so the REST interface was the primary deliverable and is fully functional for all usage. We wanted to provide some visibility to the data being collected, so we added support for basic viewlets to show this data. These are for viewing only and have limited actions (compare and show attributes) and do not support message browsing. These are scheduled for upcoming updates.
Other 10.4 highlights
A summary of the highlights of 10.4 can be found in the resource center here.
These include the following:
- Transfer dashboard ownership from inactive users
- Freeze viewlet columns when scrolling
- Filter viewlet by specific columns
- New global and user settings
- Streaming queues support extensions
- New "Force Refresh" viewlet mode
- Search object attribute names or values from the console
- Viewlet schemas now support the secondary sort option
- Additional Kafka viewlets
- Delete IIB Message Flows, Sub Flows, and Resources
Planning to Upgrade?
While we encourage all customers to get to the latest release, we want to remind you that the support team is available for questions about the upgrade and any problems you may experience during the process. The support team is not a resource that can do the upgrade for you. If you need assistance with upgrading, your Technical Account Manager can work with you to some extent, but a Professional Services engagement is the best way to ensure proper planning, preparation, and execution. Opening a ticket with support is still the right place to start, and if the support team deems that Professional Services are required, they will assign the ticket accordingly.
Most customers are on Navigator 10.x, which is great, but a few customers have continued to run WGS 6. This is no longer supported, so we encourage everyone to move as soon as possible. For 10.x customers, the database upgrade is handled automatically, but for WGS 6 customers, we no longer support a direct migration from the WGS DB tables to WGS 10, so additional preparation is needed.
Changes to the release notes
With 10.4, we are transitioning to online release notes. This will ensure that the information you get is up to date, should any changes be required after shipping. So, unlike in previous releases, you will not find them in the product folders. Instead, the product folders include a document with the online release notes link only. We have always published the release notes in the resource center so that is not new, but making this change also allowed us to link directly from the release notes to related articles in the resource center. For example, you can get the 10.4.0 server release notes here.
Popular FAQs & Articles
Changes to Navigator users’ roles or responsibilities may require a dashboard that is owned by one user to be passed on to another. Learn how to change a dashboard’s owner in Navigator here.
If you’re looking for ways to customize your user interface to suit your needs, check out the FAQs below:
- Change viewlet colors to distinguish products and more here.
- Keep key columns in place as you scroll through viewlets here.
Middleware Performance Benchmark
What’s the best performing messaging platform for your application and workload?
This is a question that can take immense effort to analyze and answer. Whether you are building a new app, upgrading existing, or moving workloads to the cloud, this report will help you make the right decision. We have done weeks of performance testing under varying workloads and configurations to compare messaging middleware platforms.
Report Outline:
This report compares the performance of these commonly used messaging middleware platforms:
- IBM MQ
- RabbitMQ
- Apache Kafka
- ActiveMQ Classic
- ActiveMQ Artemis
- TIBCO EMS*
- Apache Pulsar*
The report also includes methodology, environment, the performance of tests, the results, and the conclusions. *New to the April 2022 edition
Download the free report today!
Our Blog
Our blog is one way we are working to raise the profile of teams that work on IBM MQ, messaging middleware, and the entire Integration Infrastructure Management (i2M) layer of the IT stack. Read and share these recent blogs to help spread the word:
- What is Kafka Monitoring?
- What is IBM Cloud Pak for Integration?
- Why You Need APM—and How it Works
- Just How Important Is Your Integration infrastructure?
Click HERE to read our blog.
XRay COVID-19 Data Lake
We have pulled together multiple COVID-19 datasets from CDC, Johns Hopkins University, and several others into a single interactive data lake on which you can do the following.
The data lake is updated daily with the latest COVID-19 stats from around the world. View the dashboard live, no registration required!
Webinars & TechTalks
OnDemand Webinars
- OnDemand - A Technical Introduction to the Nastel i2M Solution
- OnDemand - Future Trends & Technology for Your Integration Infrastructure
- OnDemand - Frustrated with time-to-delivery for new apps with messaging middleware?
Click HERE to see our library of other on-demand sessions.
Keeping up with Nastel
On Thursday, December 16th, 2021, we announced Nastel Products Are Not Affected by Log4j Vulnerability Issues. Here is the press release that discusses how Nastel Technologies customers will not be exposed to any risks from this vulnerability, but enterprises are encouraged to check with their Cloud and other solution vendors to protect themselves and their data:
Nastel Products Are Not Affected by Log4j Vulnerability Issues
We want to ensure you and your colleagues can easily find all our recent press releases and other news, so here is the Nastel News archive for your convenience: