New and updated features.

These release notes give an overview of the changes for the 2021-15.x to 2021-19.x releases of the VMware Tanzu Observability (formerly known as VMware Aria Operations for Applications) service.

2021-19.x Release Notes

  • Level-A Accessibility Improvements: Wavefront now includes level-A accessibility fixes for keyboard navigation and colorblind support. With this release, a few level-AA issues are addressed as well. Wavefront uses color contrast to support colorblind accessibility and allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the menus and options of the following list of pages:

    • Dashboards Browser page
    • Dashboard page
    • Alerts Browser page
    • Alert Viewer page
    • Events list page

    For the list of keyboard shortcuts, see Wavefront Keyboard Navigation.

  • New Filters in the Alerts Browser: In the Alerts Browser, you can now also use a Services or Applications filter, so that you can filter for Applications-related alerts that you have created and defined within Distributed Tracing.

  • Ability to Update Apdex Threshold of Multiple Services: With this release, you can update the Apdex Threshold of multiple Application Services at once. For information, see Configure the Threshold Value.

  • Documentation Improvements:

2021-18.x Release Notes

No user-visible changes.

2021-17.x Release Notes

  • Create Alerts for Your Services: Now, you can create alerts for your services from the tracing application status page.

    • The threshold in the alert that you create is based on the current view and the service that you selected. You can change which RED metrics or Apdex to use for a threshold.
    • You can define and set the alert either for the selected service or for all services.
    • You can also switch to advanced mode and fine-tune the alert.
  • Full PromQL Support in the UI: We’ve expanded the limited PromQL support and we added:

    • Full support for creating charts and alerts with PromQL queries.
    • Admin-level setting that determines whether users can write queries in PromQL.
    • Additional user-level settings for PromQL behavior. For example, you can display the translation to Wavefront query language for any PromQL query, by default.

    See Using PromQL in Wavefront for information about enabling PromQL and how to use PromQL in charts and alerts.

    Prometheus query

  • UI Updates: The System Preferences option that Administrators can access from the gear icon, is now renamed to Organization Settings.

  • Pass a Time Window in Markdown Charts: You can now pass a time window in a markdown chart, so that the dynamic link to a chart or a dashboard in the markdown chart respectively opens a chart or a dashboard within the current time range. For details, see Markdown Chart.

2021-16.x Release Notes

  • Alert Notifications to Tracing Dashboard: Customize your alert notification to include a link to a Tracing Service dashboard.
  • Deprecation of HipChat Integration: The HipChat integration is no longer available in the product or the documentation.
  • Trace ID Search Ignores Selected Time Window: When you search for a Trace ID, the search now returns results regardless of the selected time window.

2021-15.x Release Notes

  • Product Improvements: Going forward, Spans that have special characters in the application or service name are rejected by Wavefront and are not supported by the tracing user interfaces.

    Example:

    !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[&#92;]^_&#96;{|}~
    
  • Documentation Improvements: