ServiceNav 4.0

The history

Since its launch 8 years ago, ServiceNav SaaS has grown from a few dozen metrics to several million.

With the arrival of connected objects, the analytical requirements croissants and the new customer projects the trend can only accelerate in the months and years to come.

As a publisher, we must anticipate this and take advantage of it.

The choice of Big Data

So in the summer of 2016, we made the choice to start a complete overhaul of our backend, towards a Big Data architecture.

The objective was twofold:

• Be proactive in managing the increase in volume, in order to maintain a constant level of quality
• Implementing a sustainable architecture geared towards new uses

This necessary transition required the attention of a large part of our development team.

A choice consistent with our strategy

Our supervision solution as a source of massive data, coupled with our historical know-how on customer service processes, allows us to project analytical and decision-making uses.

Coservit's objective, through a strong culture of innovation, is to position itself as a key player in the performance of IT support centres.

Analysed from this angle, Big Data is not an end in itself but a means to an end. a wayto support this strategy and to assist large service providers in their development, enabling them to address new markets and increase their large-scale outsourcing capabilities

Implementation and availability

• What are the implications?
  • For SaaS customers: the activation of Big Data ingestion flows is already effective.
  • For dedicated platform customers: we will open the Big Data architecture to our dedicated customers in Q1 2019. In this context, the infrastructure will have to be adapted to support the new architecture.

• We will publish the detailed recommendations later. As an indication, and depending on the volume to be managed and the "High Availability" needs, there will be 1 to 3 VMs to add.

A new Dashboard module has been added to ServiceNav the Dataviz

Unlike traditional dashboards, which have few parameters and are limited to one per screen, the Dataviz allows you to design complex dashboards using the different widgets of the library.

The widgets available at the release of version 4.0 are :

• Graph: display a metric as a time graph
• Gauge: display of a metric in the form of a gauge
• Map: display of a Map (application mapping) already in place
• Tools: Image/Text

Dataviz will gradually (Q1 2019) replace the current dashboard carousel, offering the entire current "dashboard" functional offering in widget form, in a more modern form:

• Status list (version 4.1)
• Equipment map (version 4.1)
• User Services Map (version 4.1)
• Fleet tracking by family (version 4.1)
• Fleet tracking by category (version 4.1)

In this interval, the "Dashboard" menu item in ServiceNav will contain two entries: "Classic" and "Dataviz", allowing a smooth transition to the new functionality.

New widgets will also appear on the following versions:

• IT Weather Services
• List of past/present/upcoming maintenance
• Date/Time
• Top/Flop Netflow
• ...

Important note: The Dataviz functionality requires ServiceNav to be running in a "Big Data" stream.

This flow is currently only activated on the SaaS platformand will be available for dedicated platforms in the first quarter of 2019.

The Dataviz functionality is therefore for the moment not available on the dedicated platforms, which does not impact the version upgrades on the latter, and the access to the rest of the news.

Documentary resources :

• Widget library (updated with each release) 
• Creation of a Dataviz dashboard

Netflow Analysis - Get a head start in network flow analysis

Monitor the flow generated by a applicationan ip source or destination and generate alerts if the thresholds are exceeded.
This only requires a little configuration, combined with a new plugin.

Resources : 

• Configuring the prerequisites : Netflow prerequisites
• Configuring and using the plug-in : NetworkAnalysis-NetFlow

Direct accesses have been added in the navigation tabs, allowing faster access to the menus of each module.

End of ServiceNav Box support in Ubuntu 12.04

The Ubuntu 12.04 LTS version that ServiceNav Boxes were based on is no longer updated and supported since April 2017.

In order to offer you a secure solution that meets your expectations, we will stop supporting SNBoxes in Ubuntu 12.04 as of 01/09/2019.

The stop will be made in 3 steps:

• From now on, our support team will strongly encourage the migration, and may have to put a patch on hold if it is already fixed in Ubuntu 16.04
• From the 01/06New plug-ins and plug-in fixes will no longer be compatible (and deployed) on Ubuntu 12.04 boxes, which will no longer be able to benefit from the catalog's evolutions
• From the 01/09We will no longer support Ubuntu 12.04 ServiceNav Boxes and they will stop reporting monitoring data.

It is therefore essential to migrate boxes based on the Ubuntu 12.04 OS to an Ubuntu 16.04 environment (available since version 3.13.1).

From this version, we propose a script to facilitate this migration. Let yourself be guided by the documentation.