18.05 enhancements
This section contains information about enhancements in the version 18.05 of BMC Remedy AR System.
New Remedy Management Console, a single interface to manage the server group
The Remedy Management Console enables management of all operations across the server group along with the following features:
- Ease of monitoring operations and administration in a server group.
- Visibility into server queues for critical processes.
- One click operation to start or stop server processes and enable or disable logs
- Apply configurations settings consistently to all servers in a server group.
No existing configuration or management screen is affected. The existing screens are still available with the same functionality. The Remedy Management console is an additional interface that provides cross-server capability.
As a best practice use the Remedy Management Console to manage the configurations stored in the Centralized Configuration.
For more information, see Configuring and monitoring AR System server groups.
Effective management of the settings under Centralized Configuration
You can choose to define global-level and local-level configurations for the settings under Centralized Configuration. This ensures consistent setting of configuration parameter in a server group and enables you to maintain flexibility of local-level configurations.
Global-level configurations are defined for all servers in a server group. Local-level configurations are defined for an individual server. Any configuration in the centralized configuration that is specified under the Component Name field with an asterisk (*) is a global-level configuration and applies to all servers in the server group.
As a best practice use the Server Group Configuration screen of the Remedy Management Console to set the global-level and local-level configurations.
For more information, see Managing AR Server Group components by setting global-level and local-level configurations.
BMC Remedy Deployment Application enhancements
BMC Remedy Deployment Application now has the following additional capabilities:
Integrate custom application with BMC Remedy Deployment Application
BMC Remedy Deployment Application has an extensible framework that allows you to promote objects from your custom application across development, QA, and production environments. You can also promote data from out-of-the-box Remedy IT Service Management application objects that are currently not supported by the Development to Production functionality.
For more information, see
Integrating a custom application with BMC Remedy Deployment Application
.
Additional out-of-the-box options for Application Object
You can use BMC Remedy Deployment Application to promote an application object across development, QA, and production environments. In addition to Task Template and Task Group Templates, you can now promote Incident Templates, Work Order Templates, and Change templates by adding them to a deployment package.
For more information, see
Promoting application objects by using BMC Remedy Deployment Application
.
Promote CMDB CDM definitions across environments
You can now reliably promote CMDB CDM definitions across development, QA, and production environments by using BMC Remedy Deployment Application.
For more information, see
Promoting CMDB CDM Definitions across environments
.
Role-based access to create and deploy a package
In BMC Remedy Deployment Application, you can now define role-based access to enable users to perform different operations based on their need. This access enables users who are not administrators to perform operations such as creating, viewing, copying, and deploying packages.
For more information, see 2019-10-21_03-49-49_BMC Remedy Deployment Application roles and permissions.
Command line interface to manage a package
You can promote data and definitions across development, QA, and production environments by using the command-line interface (CLI). You can perform multiple command-line operations such as Build, Import, Export, and Rollback.
For more information, see Using a command-line interface to manage a package.
Protect your environment by importing BMC signed packages
All packages offered by BMC are digitally signed. Digitally signined package protects your application from malicious code and secures your environment.All packages offered by BMC are digitally signed. Digitally signed package protects your application from malicious code and secures your environment.
For more information, see Protect your environment with secured package deployment.
License Management enhancements
The License Management enhancements introduced in this release aims to simplify the following:
- Configuring license limits
- Assignment of licenses
- Consumption of licenses
- Analytics and reporting of license consumption
Note
The existing licensing system will continue to work as before even if you do not configure the new licensing enhancements. The new licensing enhancements require AR System Server components and Mid Tier at 18.05 version.
Enhancement | Description | Reference topics |
---|---|---|
Automatically logging user license consumption in the AR System Historical License Usage form | To make sure that the data in the AR System Current License Usage form and the AR System Historical License Usage form is accurate and is in sync with each other, the current license usage information is now recorded on the AR System Historical License Usage form along with the AR System Current License Usage form. Additionally, when the user logs out, the records on the AR System Historical License Usage form are updated with the release time of the license. The AR System Historical License Usage form is a single point of reference from where you can determine who is consuming user licenses; whether currently or over a certain period of time in the past. Note: As per the behavior in the earlier releases, the AR System Historical License Usage form captures license consumption data in a consolidated form from all the servers in the server group. | |
Configuring license limits, assigning licenses to users, and controlling and reporting license consumption in alignment with how the user licenses were purchased | To configure license limits, assign licenses to users, and control and report license consumption in alignment with how user licenses were purchased, BMC is providing support for bundled licenses. As a system administrator, you can now assign bundled licenses to the users, which are used to access the BMC Remedy AR System server and the applications. You can select the following additional options while adding licences from the AR System Administration Console (System > General > Add or Remove Licenses):
Also, while creating a new user or modifying an existing user, you can assign the bundled licenses to the user. | |
Improved concurrent license server consumption analysis in a server group | For the system administrator to have access to the accurate license consumption data across all the servers in a server group, multiple enhancements have been made to the BMC Remedy AR System Administration Console > Manage User Licenses form. Additionally, for the Server - Current Users and Application - Current users, the Licence Grant Time details are displayed. Using this new information, the BMC Remedy AR System Server Group Administration Console now allows you to see the data across all the servers in a server group. | |
Adding license configuration, control, and auditing for BMC Knowledge Management | As a system administrator, you can now control the license capacity by configuring the user license limit for Knowledge Management. Additionally, you can also generate a license audit report that includes the license usage information for Knowledge Management. Make sure that the Knowledge Management Module license for the Knowledge Management application is added through the Add or Remove Licenses form in the AR System Administration Console. For more information, see Knowledge Management permissions. Note: The Knowledge Management application currently does not enforce users to have a Knowledge Management license. If any users do not have a Knowledge Management licence and if you assign them the licenses in this release, after upgrading to a future release (where it is enforced), they can continue to use these assigned licenses to access the BMC Knowledge Management system without any additional configurations. | |
Enhancements to license usage | To gather information about license usage, each BMC Remedy AR System server scans the system approximately every 45 minutes and writes the results to LicenseReport.txt. From this release, as a backup, the server also uploads the LicenseReport.txt file in the database. During the next scan after 45 minutes, if the server does not find the LicenseReport.txt file in the ARServer/Db directory, the backup file gets downloaded from the database and is updated. |
What's changed in this release
Enhancement | Product behavior in versions earlier than 18.05 | Product behavior in version 18.05 |
---|---|---|
Renamed AR Definitions | The Content Type field on the Deployment Package Information form shows the following types:
| The Content Type field on the Deployment Package Information form is renamed in order to give more clarity about the content type you are selecting. The content types are renamed to;
|
New Status on AR System Deployment Management Console | AR System Deployment Management console has the following new statuses:
| |
Delete old server entries from the server group | You cannot delete old server entries from server group metadata tables using the arsrename utility. | You can delete old server entries from the server group using the You must perform this activity only on the primary server. For more information, see Renaming the AR System server. |
Mid tier thread dump interface | You use a command to collect thread dumps. | Use the thread dump interface on the Log Settings page to collect logs of all the Java activities in your environment. This interface offers a simplified process of collecting thread dumps. For more information, see 2020-04-15_04-42-15_Configuring the Log Settings page. |
New filter in the web.xml file | The following filters were existing in the web.xml file:
You need to manually edit the web.xml file to enable these filters. | The following filters are merged;
and a new filter |
New security header for mid tier | The new security header
Add the following code to the web.xml file to disable the headers.
| |
Disabled web report drill down | Web reports can contain links to the underlying data. This allows you to drill down by clicking the links to open the underlying records and work interactively with the data in the report. | You cannot drill down a web report. For more information, Opening the records in a Web report. |
Remedy Data Migrator | Previously, if you migrate data using the Delta Data Migrator package having the User and CTM:People forms' data, the users could not login using those credentials after migration, since the passwords were changed during migration due to new password policy. The login fails due to the change in password storage format. When you login to BMC Remedy AR System server 9.1, the password is stored in a new format. However the older clients use the old client libraries to export data and assume that the password is in old format, and we cannot export the User form data and import back. Workaround:
| Starting with the version 18.05, from the Delta Data Migrator (DDM) package the following two forms are removed:
Workaround:
|
The arsignald log file is removed | The arsignald log file tracks the startup and shutdown of the arsignald daemon and all signals sent between servers in the group. | This is automatically handled by the encache RMI cache replication in the AR System Server. |
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