This section identifies the changes and enhancements that have been made in since the last release of Tideway Foundation (7.2).

Understanding your estate

• Automatic Grouping builds groups of servers that work closely together, based on an analysis of the communications between them. It highlights high-risk servers that touch a large portion of the estate. Hosts can be excluded from automatic grouping, allowing you to remove highly connected hosts for better analysis of the others.
• Manual Grouping enables you to build groups of hosts to help manage them through a project. The mass action, reports, and visualisation UIs have been reworked to make them all much more consistent and user-friendly to support this. Manual Grouping is used in manual pattern execution in the same way as the basket was in previous releases of Tideway Foundation.
• Host Profiles are per-host reports that contain essential details and an analysis of the host's network traffic in an accessible, easy-to-use format. They've been designed with meetings and workshops in mind: email them, print them, discuss them, annotate them.
• The Baseline Dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of how your baseline's progressing, along with insights into the operating systems and technologies discovered.
• Improved CSV import capabilities make it easy to bring data from other scannning and management products into your Tideway Foundation datastore, giving you a fuller picture of the estate.
• Visualizations are now all displayed embedded in the Foundation UI. You can now view multiple visualizations simultaneously. This is described in Viewing Dependency Visualizations.
• A summary of historical network communication information is available for each communication link displayed in a visualization.

Making Discovery Easier to Understand

• Discovery metadata has been expanded to cover Windows as well as UNIX. This provides information about why sessions failed to be established and why scripts failed to run, including information about what credential or slave was used.
• The DiscoveryAccess Page has been significantly updated to improve readability and access to information.
• Improved Credential Vault Management makes it easier to manage the secure storage of your usernames and passwords.
• The system now reports extensive information about the usage and most recent failures of credentials and slaves.
• Scanner files are now fully supported and their use is correctly reported in the UI.
• Cancellation of Consolidation runs is now possible. See Cancelling a Consolidation Run

Configuration Improvements

• More consistent look-and-feel of credential management pages, including drag-and-drop ordering on all pages.
• You can now configure a custom SSH port per credential, that is, not port 22.
• You can also disable pinging of selected ranges, rather than the previous global setting.
• Configuration and management of ssh keys for log-in is now undertaken in the UI rather than using the command line.
• Scheduled scans and exclude ranges can be edited.
• Various new reports, including model health reports and better coverage of virtualization platforms.
• A new and more flexible reports and additional links format.
• The permissions details in the Add Group page have been grouped according to the subsystems that they refer to, and the selection of permissions is now more obvious.
• Disk Space Monitor avoid the problems which can occur when the appliance runs out of disk space.
• Online Data Compaction

New Channel Types

The following new channel types are available for inclusion.

• Video - video-channel
• RSS feed - rss-channel
• Web feed - web-channel

TPL Improvements

• TPL now supports listing a directory

Export

• The extended RDB mapping set has been modified to allow export of Foundation data into an Oracle database. The table structure for Virtual Containers data has been changed so that it is within the maximum column name length imposed by Oracle.

Improved CPU reporting accuracy

This release has improved our CPU detection abilities, over previous versions of Foundation. Significant changes have been made across all the major platforms: Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. There is also new functionality which enables you to actively improve CPU reporting by doing things like installing patches on hosts in your estate.

Many other smaller improvements

• JDBC drivers can now be uploaded from the UI, see JDBC Drivers.
• You can now view and cancel in progress Generic Search Queries. See Cancelling Searches for more information.
• The basket has been removed and its functionality (as used in manual pattern execution) has been replaced by Manual Grouping in this release.
• Under the hood there have also been a large number of updates to the third-party tools and packages we use.