New Features in IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps v3.4
In this blog post, I briefly highlight some of the new supported features introduced in the latest major release of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, v3.4.
New connectors
There are now out-of-the-box connectors for ingesting metrics data from AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Both of these connectors collect different types of metrics, including live and historical data. With these two new connectors, Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps can ingest metric data from these external data sources and then detect and report any anomalies in those metrics. Detected metric anomalies are reported as alerts, which can then be correlated with other events and alerts, using temporal, topological, and scope-based relationships. Note that, at the time of writing, topology and events data are not read via these two new connectors. For more information on these new connectors, please see:
New connector SDK
A new connector SDK is now available that allows implementing custom integrations between external data sources and IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. This new SDK can be used to ingest events, alerts, metrics, and topology data. Once a custom connector is implemented, it is packaged as a container image that runs a gRPC client to communicate with IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. You can deploy the custom connector on the same Red Hat OpenShift cluster where Watson AIOps is deployed or on a remote environment closer to your external data source. For more information, we invite you to explore the official GitHub repository, cp4waiops-connectors.
Backup and restore
There is now support for backing up and restoring IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps. This process includes backing up the following relevant data assets:
- Log anomaly detection and metric anomaly detection templates and models.
- Trained models for similar incident analysis.
- Risk models, risk assessments, incidents, and ticket data assets for change risk assessment.
- Active events and alerts, as well as historic alert information.
- Runbook automations.
- Topology data.
- Policies.
For more details on the requirements for implementing a successful backup and restore procedure for Watson AIOps, please see AI Manager backup and restore.
Feedback on change risk assessments
Using the ChatOps user interface, users can now provide feedback on the risk score Watson AIOps assigns after assessing a change request ticket. Also, users can provide feedback on the relevancy of the change requests that Watson AIOps determined to be related to the assessed ticket. The feedback option is displayed as a thumbs up and thumbs down button under the change risk assessment as shown in the screenshot below. Providing feedback helps improve the quality of the change risk model, which should then result in even better risk scores. For more details, please see Change risk in ChatOps.
Parse output of an action
You can now filter the output of SSH actions or HTTP actions to return only the data that you are interested in. If you would like to use the output of one action as input for another action (i.e. a chain multiple actions), then you will find this new capability extremely useful. To take advantage of this new capability, you define a pattern that dictates which part of the action output gets returned. There are three supported pattern-matching engines that you can choose from:
- XPath: For parsing XML data.
- JSONPath: For parsing JSON data.
- Regular expression: For parsing other types of data such as unstructured data.
Additional capabilities
For information on additional capabilities and features in this latest release of IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps (such as vulnerability fixes and technology previews), please take a look at the release notes.
