New and updated features.

These release notes give an overview of the changes for Release 2020-30.x of the VMware Tanzu Observability (formerly known as VMware Aria Operations for Applications) service.

OpenTelemetry Support in Wavefront

OpenTracing and OpenCensus have merged to form OpenTelemetry. You can use OpenTelemetry to send metrics or traces to Wavefront using the Prometheus, Jaeger, or Zipkin integration. See OpenTelemetry for details.

Tracing Features

Aggregated RED Metrics

To make RED metric querying faster, Wavefront introduced pre-aggregated RED metrics. Querying and aggregating service-level RED metrics can be slow due to high cardinality from operation tags, source tags, and custom tags.

RED Metrics for Tracing Traffic

Traffic shows how applications and services interact with each other. You can visualize traffic data in charts using tracing traffic derived metrics. See RED Metrics for Tracing Traffic for details.

Live View, External Services and Other UI Improvements

This release includes several UI improvements.

  • Use Map View Settings to toggle these features:
    • Show/hide external applications or services, such as Amazon services or database services that your application communicates with. Group those external services.
    • Show/hide isolated services, which are services that are not used by any other services or applications.
    • Show/hide service labels.
  • Turn on Live View for the application map below the toolbar. The refresh rate for Live View is 5 minutes.

Alert Improvements and convertWhiteSpace Parameter

  • Alert notifications to Slack are now more succinct.
  • New convertWhiteSpace utility parameter to convert characters that cause problems in a JSON file (\t \n \x0B \f \r etc.) to white space.

Miscellaneous Improvements

We made the following improvements to the Wavefront service.

  • It’s now possible to specify threshold-based coloring for a heatmap chart.
  • The missing function now returns 0 or 1.
  • Starting with release 2020.14, dynamic dashboard variables included a wildcard option. By default, users could select the wildcard or any of the other variable options. Based on customer feedback, we’re now making this behavior configurable with the Include an All(*) option checkbox.

    Dashboards created between 2020.14 and 2020.30 continue to show the wildcard unless you explicitly change it.

    Cropped screenshot showing the checkbox

In Wavefront Proxy 9.0, released recently, the following properties were renamed:

  • *blackListRegex is now *block
  • *whiteListRegex is now *allow

New AWS Tag Support

The release supports extracting some AWS tags that were not previously supported.

AWS Resource Tags (Elasticsearch)

Wavefront now supports extracting AWS Resource Tags from the Elasticsearch service. Enter a regex that matches the tag keys that you want to retrieve into the Point Tag Whitelist when you configure the CloudWatch integration. Any matching tags will be read and included as Wavefront point tags on all Elasticsearch metrics.

If you are using a custom IAM policy, include these additional permissions for this functionality to work:

  • es:ListDomainNames
  • es:DescribeElasticsearchDomain
  • es:ListTags

Account Alias

Wavefront can add the human-readable accountAlias= point tag on all AWS metrics (akin to the existing numeric accountId= tag).

If you are using a custom IAM policy, include the following additional permissions for this functionality to work:

  • iam:ListAccountAliases

Documentation Changes

Table of contents screenshot
We reorganized our tracing content to improve the on-boarding experience for tracing. The screenshot on the left shows the restructured content. Start with Tracing Basics to start exploring.