These release notes outline the new features and improvements available in the initial public release of OmniCenter 11.

New Features and Improvements

1-Minute Polling for Network Interfaces

• Network interfaces faster than 1GB/s will have bandwidth and errors polled at 1-minute intervals. Future updates will enable this option to be user-selected for specific interfaces.

New User-configurable Dashboards

• Users now have the ability to customize high-level dashboards according to their own preferences in four different categories of the dashboard:
  • Generic dashboards
  • Site dashboards
  • Category dashboards
  • Strategic group dashboards
• Users can also now create role-specific dashboards (for example, management, engineering, command center, etc.), with each providing different information relevant to its intended user.
• Different OmniCenter organization dashboards can have different default views based on organization attributes (for example, large site dashboards can have a different layout from small site dashboards).
• Administrators can now set any dashboard as being available for unauthenticated users.
• Custom dashboards can now be restricted by user privilege level.
• All generic custom dashboards now include a slide view feature that scrolls through the dashboard widgets for NOC displays.

Better Traffic Collection Tools

• Automatic application detection via NBAR2 support.
• Statistical data is now collected for traffic flows, meaning threshold and anomaly checks can be set based on application/interface pairs. These thresholds are set per application and are based on the percentage of an interface’s bandwidth that the application is using.
• Details and graphs for collected traffic flows are available in 1-minute granularity.
• 3-year history for per-interface application-level flow statistics.
• OmniCenter now offers the option of collecting traffic flow data using separate servers via multiple OTC (OmniCenter Traffic Collector) appliances, providing tremendous horizontal scaling capability.

New Logging Capabilities

• All logs collected by OmniCenter can now be aggregated and analyzed based on user-created statistical rules. Users can also create static rules for search-and-match alert generation.
• Administrators can now set threshold and anomaly checks for all logs.
• OmniCenter now offers the option of collecting logs using separate servers via multiple OLC (OmniCenter Log Collector) appliances, providing even more horizontal scaling capability.

Strategic Group Polling

• Statistical data is now collected for strategic groups, allowing them to treated like pollable objects. This opens new options for monitoring and alerting. The data is accessible via all standard OmniCenter analysis mechanisms (top talkers reports, threshold checks, anomaly detection, etc.).

Maintenance Window Expansion

• Maintenance windows can now be assigned to devices based on device grouping (site, category, strategic group) or application, as well as by individual device.
• Maintenance windows now support regular schedules for daily, weekly, and monthly windows.
• New, “instant” maintenance windows allow a user to put a device into maintenance immediately without scheduling a window.
• Maintenance windows are now completely logged. They record when a maintenance window was started, by which scheduling method, and by which user.

IPv6 Support

• OmniCenter now fully supports FQDN devices that return IPv6 addresses.

PowerShell Polling Support for Windows Devices

• All WinRM polling has been moved over to using the PowerShell Remoting Protocol (PSRP).

New Incident Management Capabilities

• You can now add incident management rules to suppress alerts for devices that have only recently been added.