2020 Archive

2020 Archive of Sysdig Monitor (SaaS) release notes.

December 16, 2020

Statement RE: Solarwinds and Sysdig’s Security

We have seen requests for statements regarding tooling in the wake of the Solarwinds and related compromises. Sysdig does not use these tools internally. To maintain a secure SDLC process for own product we use Sysdig Secure as well as source code analysis tools. We also maintain our own branch of key OSS components to ensure software is fully vetted before it’s delivered to customers.

November 19, 2020

Explore Workflow Enhancements

The Explore interface has been improved to allow faster troubleshooting.

You are now launched directly into the drill-down view when you navigate to Explore. You will still be able to group and navigate your infrastructure by using the hierarchical scope tree.

The new Grouping editor helps you create and manage your infrastructure groupings.

For more information, see Explore.

Transfer Dashboard Ownership

Administrators have now the ability to transfer dashboard ownership to another user. For more information, see Transfer Dashboard Ownership.

Enhancements for Navigating Dashboards

You can now pin the dashboard menu to the sidebar in the Sysdig Monitor UI. Pinning makes it easier to navigate and browse different Dashboards. In addition, the Dashboard interface has been enhanced to retain your preference for open or closed categories to help you locate the desired items faster.

October 22, 2020

Visualizing Missing Data on Dashboards

Dashboards now show null or missing data values as gaps instead of zero. Optionally, missing data can be displayed as a dotted or solid line in both Form-based and PromQL panels. StatsD metrics will continue to show null values as zero unless overridden by the settings. For more information, see Display Missing Data.

Time Navigation in Events Feed

You can now browse and find historic events easily by using time navigation.

Zooming Out Dashboards

You now have the ability to zoom out Dashboards. This feature doubles the selected timeframe by 2x for a better context surrounding a problem when troubleshooting an incident.

July 27, 2020

Sysdig Essentials

We have introduced a new product tier, Sysdig Essentials. This tier includes everything required to achieve the five essential requirements for practicing Secure DevOps:

  • Image Scanning

  • Runtime Security

  • Compliance

  • Kubernetes and container monitoring

  • Application and cloud service monitoring

To learn more about Essentials, register for our webinar, Deploy Faster by Automating Container Security, Monitoring and Compliance.

With the introduction of Essentials, It’s also easier to get started with a trial program and manage your Sysdig subscription.

Learn the difference between Essentials and Enterprise, including pricing and features, at Pricing.

Rebranded Login Page

The login page has been updated with the Sysdig Kraken and the new logo.

Sysdig Monitor Enhancements

Hosts Overview

To complement Sysdig Kubernetes Overviews, Hosts Overview has been released. Host Overview provides a unified view of the performance and health of physical hosts in your infrastructure.

New and Improved Empty States

A number of different splash screens have been introduced to guide you through getting up and running with features across the application.

Sysdig Platform Enhancements

SAML Single Sign-On

The initial email to the following types of users will take them directly to the Single-Sign-On URL, and not the registration page.

  • SAML SSO Users

  • The users that are invited to the platform (as opposed to having them automatically created via Sysdig on-demand provisioning for SSO)

Earlier, landing on the registration page was confusing to users because they had to set up their initial password.

June 17, 2020

This 3.2.6 release focuses on the general availability of New Dashboard with a rich set of features and enhancements. Learn more about the release from the blog post, New and improved dashboards .

New Dashboards is GA

Sysdig Monitor offers a new version of dashboards. Its improved editing experience provides you with more flexibility and the new set of functionalities offers additional ways to visualize and consume your Sysdig data.

Features and Enhancements

Improved User Experience

The New Dashboard offers a more fluid, natural dashboard building experience. The UI has been redesigned to introduce two types of panels—form-based and PromQL-based— to make visualizing your metrics effortless. Use a PromQL-based panel to build dashboards for Prometheus raw metrics and custom metrics. The form-based panel for legacy queries.

Dashboard Sharing

You can now share your dashboard with members within your Sysdig team or share it across teams with fine-grained access controls. Define who should be able to see the dashboards and what level of access they should be granted: view only or collaborator with edit privileges.

Time Series Name Templating

Customize the time series names on the legend on the panel editor by using the labels associated with Prometheus metrics and segments to gain context faster.

Multi-Metric, Multi-Segmentation Options

Configure multiple queries within a single panel, and configure each query with multiple segmentation and scoping options. Individual queries can be customized to render as a line or stacked area. For more information, see Using PromQL.

Event Overlay

Contextualize metrics and understand the “why” faster with a unified view of both metrics and events. Configure event overlay to display events from Kubernetes environments as well as alert events, and any other events ingested using Sysdig’s open REST API. For more information.

Dashboard Templates

You can quickly view your infrastructure through the lens of one of Sysdig’s curated dashboards, or use it as a base to start building your own. You can find dashboard templates for managing Kubernetes capacity and health, hosts and server performance, applications and services telemetry, and the security posture of your infrastructure with data fed from Sysdig Secure. See Dashboard Templates to learn more.

Mapping Values to Text

Instantly understand what’s going on by mapping number panel values to text. If you have a metric that returns 1 for up, and 0 for down, map those values to “UP” and “DOWN” respectively. By defining thresholds and mapping to text, you don’t need to be concerned about the values. This is critically valuable when dashboards are shared between team members. For more information, see Text.

Granular Axes and Legend Controls

You have more flexibility when customizing the axes, as well as better support for time series with long names. You can now configure the legend by toggling its visibility and moving it to the bottom of the panel.

Major Changes

Significant changes have been introduced to enhance the usability of the existing functionalities. Review the changes before you explore the functionalities.

Topology Maps

Topology maps are no longer available in Dashboard. Access Topology maps through Explore, as you explore your microservices and Kubernetes applications.

Dashboard Wizard

My Dashboards are no longer accessible in Explore. Additionally, Dashboard Wizard has been removed. Instead, the concept of Templates has been introduced in Dashboards to help you get started with a library of templates addressing key use cases.

Histogram and Summary Metric Type

Histogram and summary metrics are no longer supported in the Histogram panel type. You can continue to use them within Explore. If you have enabled PromQL, we encourage you to use Prometheus functions for visualizing histograms.

Use the new Prometheus histograms with the histogram_quantile metrics on a time-series graph.

APIs and Integrations

API endpoints for the legacy dashboards (v2) will soon be deprecated. If you are directly integrating into the API, please contact Sysdig for guidance. Additionally, our Python SDK and CLI have been updated to support the new dashboards APIs.

PromQL Support

PromQL support for querying Prometheus metrics has been rolled out to a subset of Sysdig Monitor users. See Using PromQL.

Intelligent $__interval

Use $__interval within a PromQL query and Sysdig will intelligently use the most appropriate sampling depending on the time range you have selected. This configuration ensures that we balance providing access to the most granular data available while downsampling when you select a long time range to panels load as fast as possible.

Scope variables

Configure scope variables at the dashboard level to quickly filter metrics based on cluster, namespace, workload, and more. When using PromQL queries, the scope can be injected by using dynamic variables. This configuration is significant when troubleshooting as it allows you to switch context quickly without reconfiguring queries.

Smart Autocompletion and Syntax Highlighting

Autocomplete suggests metrics, operators, and functions, while syntax highlighting helps keep you on the right path and helps highlight problems within a PromQL query. This is invaluable in dynamic environments and allows you to craft the right queries faster.

Configurable Default Team Role

You can now define the default user role to apply when a new member is added to the team. The Admin can change this default on a per-team basis. See also: Create a Team.

RBAC and Team Assignment for Notification Channels

Previously, notification channels in Sysdig Secure and Monitor were treated as global entities, visible and editable for most users of the platform regardless of team configurations.

We are enhancing the management and RBAC controls in the following ways:

  • Notification channels can now be “global” or limited to a particular team

  • Global channels can be managed by admins and can be viewed/used by other roles, while team-limited channels are available only to team members

  • Team Manager , Advanced User, and Service Manager (Secure) roles can create/update/delete team-scoped notification channels, they can also read and use the global ones

  • Standard and View Only roles can read team-limited and global notification channels

  • Admins will be able to create global notification channels and migrate channels from “global” to “team-limited”, and also from one team to another.

See also: Set Up Notification Channels and the Share With field in each individual channel setting page.

May 15, 2020

The New Get Started Page

The Get Started page provides the key steps to ensure that you are getting the most value out of Sysdig Monitor. We’ll update this page with new steps as we add new features to Sysdig Monitor.

The Get Started page also serves as a linking page for:

  • Documentation

  • Release Notes

  • The Sysdig Blog

  • Self-Paced Training

  • Support

You can access the page at any time by clicking the rocketship icon in the left navigation bar. See Getting Started with Sysdig Monitor.

AWS Role Delegation

Sysdig Monitor can now utilize the Amazon Web Service (AWS) AssumeRole functionality and discover cloud assets, grab CloudWatch metrics from your AWS account, and use custom S3 bucket for storing captures. Upon integrating with an AWS role, you can delegate access to AWS resources that are not associated with your Sysdig AWS account.

Role delegation is an alternative to the existing integration method using the access keys. This method is considered secure as sharing developer access keys with third-parties is not recommended by Amazon.

For more information, see Integrate with AWS Role Delegation.

April 16, 2020

Default Dashboards for Istio 1.5

Default dashboards (Overview and Services dashboards) are now available for Istio v1.5 in addition to the existing ones for Istio v1.0.