The latest XRay release offers several exciting features. XRay's brand-new social integration capability makes it easy for team members to communicate about and share XRay queries, errors, and viewlets. Image viewlets functionality has been expanded. Annotated images can illustrate a variety of scenarios, from business processes to geographical data.
Read on to learn about these and other new options.
Social integration: Slack
With the XRay Slack integration, you can easily send alerts and messages to Slack users. You no longer need to use copy and paste to share queries or viewlet URLs.
- Create alerts that send Slack messages to individual users, channels, or both based on specific criteria.
- Send queries directly from the XRay user interface.
- Send a link to any viewlet (even shared viewlets) directly from the XRay user interface.
Social integrations in XRay are made up of two components: Providers and Actions.
Providers, such as Slack, Email, and Logs are the services that can be set up to receive communications from XRay. (Logs cannot be used in cloud environments.)
Setup is a simple four-step process. (See Social Integration: Slack for details.)
- Step 1. Create a Slack application.
- Step 2. Set up Slack as a Provider in XRay.
- Step 3. Set up XRay Actions for Slack.
- Step 4: Create Alerts to Trigger XRay Actions.
On the jKQL query Viewlet toolbar, you can do the following:
- Send a jKQL query or an error message.
- Share a link to a shared viewlet.
Image Viewlets
Image viewlet capabilities have been expanded to include annotations by mapping areas of an image to individual data points from your raw data.
Data can come from the following:
- Events that have been stitched into activities
- Aggregated data
- Datasets
- Logs
Business Flows Annotated with Progress
For example, your business flow diagrams can now be annotated to show progress toward completion of a process. In this case, process milestones within your diagram are mapped to values or variables that are present in the data.
Rules and formatting are applied to elements of the diagram; the display of each element is customized according to the conditions set within each rule. A DevOps process flow diagram might look like this:
Geographic Data
Image viewlets are by no means limited to business process diagrams. Due to their versatility, they lend themselves to presenting many types of data in a visual form. In this example, geographical boundaries in the image are mapped to weather data:
"Having" Filter added to Group by Option
The Having filter applies only when a "count" of records is selected for the Data Type (using the [Data Type] Count checkbox under the Fields section). In other words, for the Activity Data Type, the Activities Count checkbox must be selected; for the Log Data Type, the Logs Count checkbox must be selected; and the same holds true for all other data types (Events, Sets, Datasets, and so on).
When adding or editing a viewlet's Group by option, a "Having" filter is now available to narrow the "count" for grouped results based on the number of records in those counts. Compare the following two examples. When the Activities records are Grouped by Severity and filtered for a NumberOf > Greater than 0, Activities Counts for all Severity values are included:
But when the Activities records are Grouped by Severity and filtered for a NumberOf > Greater than 10, only Activities Counts for the Severity values with more than ten records are included:
These are the Halt, Critical, and Error Severity values.
For more information on viewlet options in XRay, see Create a viewlet (XRay).
Data Import Changes
As of version 1.5, the Data Import process imports comma-separated (.csv) and Microsoft® Excel files as datasets. In versions 1.4 and earlier, they were imported as events.
During import, you can choose whether you want to import the data into a new dataset or, if one or more datasets exist, import it into an existing one. By default, a new dataset has the same name as the imported file, but you can change it.
New Options to Edit and Delete Views
When creating a query that returns Views as results, you can now edit, delete, activate, or deactivate Views directly from the query results. Select the view to display an action menu.
For more information about Views, see Admin settings.
Support User/Password for Volumes
XRay has supported Solr authentication since version 1.4; however, all Solr clusters were required to use the same user and password. Now, XRay supports connecting to a volume even if the user and password for that volume is different than the user and password for the "master" volume.