To all who could not join us, here are rather detailed Community Call Meeting notes. I hope you will find them usefull!
Disclaimer: I tried to catch most of it but there might be some discrepansies. Please consider that.
TLDR of the call:
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There are changes on how we test things, Martin was involved in coordinating the beta release.
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MKPs might break during the update. For that there’s a “pre-flight check” included for users. For developers: check out this thread. If we get enough interest we’ll try to have a short consultation call with a developer on how to fix this.
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On the call, we did not focus on the features, we talked more about how we work, as well as answered the questions submitted. For features, take a look at the conference
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45% of people on the call already tried 2.2 beta, 55% have not yet.
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Most people on the call thought the beta will end on 1-15 of June.
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In Martin’s experience 2.2 seems the most stable compared to years before, so we are optimistic that beta won’t be long.
Beta Testing Process
We had initial stability tests in January, after that – many initial reports within Tribe29. Once big things were out of the way, mid-February we started testing in production environments. Then we did mass testing within the company.
Our new dedicated QA team has started with systematic testing of the update process, so it would become smoother with every next release.
Then we did new feature usability and edge case testing.
After that – regression testing – all our consultants checked if everything works correctly, according to documentation.
QA did Positive REST-API testing to make sure it works exactly as it should.
Unlike previous releases, the testing of 2.2 started before the first beta release and the new approach allowed us to improve the stability. There are still open issues, but no blocker issues – little annoying bugs which are ok for beta, they will not break anything serious – and they should be fixed in a couple of weeks.
Not too many issues have been sent to the feedback email, but any encountered issues are very important to us – without knowing about them we cannot fix them, so please do create the tickets that way. We do not have all of your use cases covered. Please, consider beta testing and reporting to feedback-2.2-beta(at)checkmk.com
MKP Breaking Change
MKPs might break when updated.
On the user side, we introduced a “pre-flight check”: during updates as configs are migrated during the update process and thus CMK initially sometimes broke with configs stuck in between versions. Now before config is being rewritten, it first now “fake” migrates and loads configs first to see if it works or not, in a pre-update process. If there is an error, you can decide to stop updating or disable the incompatible extension. Top-10 exchange plugins should work.
For the developers: some changes are simply incompatible, despite the compatibility layers newly built-in – we changed stuff around Python imports, and if you maintain an MKP, there are some changes you would need to make to have your plugin working. To coordinate this process, take a look at the thread where we gather people to later have a session on these changes for developers.
Q&A:
Q: “A fresh 2.2 site comes with a new builtin role called ‘agent_registration’, which registration is meant here? Bakery or TLS? Can the naming be cleared up before 2.2.0 is released :)?"
A: New role is for the agent controller, not the bakery.
The term confusion might be cleared in 2.3.
Q: “Werk 14951 drops support for Win Server 2008, which makes sense, but that version is unfortunately still in use. Would it make sense to still ship the legacy 2.1 MSI? Otherwise you have to extract a 300mb CMK server manually for just the windows .msi as it is not on github anymore?"
A: Legacy agents will be available through the link in documentation.
Q: “Prio 4 - if there is time, can you give an example of how werk 15087 works? The explanation is a little short :)”?
A: Joining Inventory tables. You can link different inventory tables into a one view. There will be documentation soon.
Q: “Is the new SAML Authentication really just available in the CEE?"
A: CEE is about comfort features – being quicker, more efficient, easier. SAML can be used in other versions on Apache level, it will just require some effort from your side, there is documentation to help you with it. SAML is now implemented directly through Python packages. New version is about having it with less pain.
Q: “It would be possible to switch between time zones in the web interface?"
A: You can set the time zone in the config. But having different time zones for users, will cause a lot of confusion when it comes to issue resolution with everyone having a different meaning for e.g. 3pm. We recommend to discuss this need through Feature Portal.
Q: I’m already a customer, what changes for me with the new license management?
A: If you are an existing customer and plan to remain on the Enterprise Edition, this release will not change anything for you. If you plan on upgrading to the Cloud Edition, you will need a license for your site.
Q: OpenShift Support?
A: Will come in 2.2 Cloud Edition