Aternity SaaS undergoes regular updates every few weeks, bringing you enhanced features, new functionality and updated dashboards.

This section lists the latest updates to Aternity SaaS. Alternatively, you can view the previous updates to Aternity.

Dashboard Library

The Aternity dashboard Library presents a vast variety of new categories and dashboards accessible from the Main Menu.

Learn more.

Anomaly Detection Alerts

Aternity is launching a new beta program for anomaly detection alerts using a machine learning engine. By monitoring the normal patterns of applications behavior, we are able to detect and alert on deviations. In the current release, alerting scenarios are:

• Drops in the application overall usage
• Increase of application crash rate

Contact the Aternity Beta Team to register to this program.

Learn more.

User Interface Enhancements (Save Dashboard)

• Dashboards can now be saved into any of the existing categories in the Main Menu. To add new categories to your menu, contact Aternity SaaS Administration.

• A new look for the Main Menu introduces multiple dashboard categories.

  

  • First in the list you see the default out of the box (OOTB) Aternity dashboards.

  • Under Aternity dashboards, you find Categories, which include My Private Dashboards, Shared Dashboards, and other categories to which you saved your customized dashboards. To add new categories to your menu,contact Aternity SaaS Administration.

  • Under My Private Dashboards, see the dashboards you saved for yourself, which cannot be shared with other people and reside separately from the dashboards created by others.

  • Under Shared Dashboards, see only those dashboards that were not saved to a specific category (mostly old dashboards, since in the new release you save dashboards to a category).
  • It is possible to save a customized dashboard under any category, including the default out of the box (OOTB) Aternity dashboards. In this case, it appears under the line in the bottom of the default Aternity dashboards list. (See Troubleshoot > My Team Devices in the above screen.)
  • If you save a dashboard under a new category, this category immediately appears under Categories. (See Categories > Productivity in the above screen.)

• A new Save Dashboard menu replaces the previous one and allows you to select in what category to save and with whom to share your dashboards.

  • You can share it with a certain person only or with groups of people if the groups are defined in Active Directory.

  • You can now schedule to send regular email updates of your customized dashboard from the same Save Dashboard window.

  • To save, share and subscribe, you first view a dashboard, customize it, then share with people and subscribe someone to regular email updates, and finally you save it.

    

Learn more.

Enhancements for Dashboards

Benefit from an improved dashboards performance and use new dashboards, such as Analyze Software Changes and Troubleshoot Device Events.

• Analyze Software Changes (Advanced) Dashboard

  • Aternity has a new dashboard to analyze the changes done to the installed software across the organization.

    Use Software Changes Data Source to check and analyze the installed software related changes on each Windows physical monitored device, along with its version and deployment date. Learn more.

    For example, when several employees have a similar complaint of performance degradation, you can see if all of them modified the same software approximately at the same time. You can also get a list of uninstalled security updates across different devices.

    

• Device Events Dashboard (Beta)

  The Device Events dashboard offers a detailed overview of all events occurred on the selected device, including health events, Boots, Service Desk Alerts (SDA), software changes, executed remediation actions, and more. Each row in the Trends section represents a certain event, you can see all types of health events for this device on one row, all Boot events on another row, and so on. With the Device Events dashboard, you can find correlations between the problems with a device and their reasons, such as between health events and software changes. For example, you can investigate problems with the device that could be due to operating system update.

  Currently, the Device Events dashboard is only supported for Windows devices.

  Learn more.

  

• As part of company's ongoing efforts to improve the overall system performance and usability, Aternity significantly improved the dashboard performance during the past few months.

Additional Enhancements

• Stability index is now enabled for virtual desktops (VDIs), so you can monitor the stability of VDIs, and not only physical desktops. Learn more.

• You can now investigate a mobile slow WiFi connection to Xirrus WiFi access points. Learn more.

• In the Troubleshoot Incidents > Incident Details dashboard, in the Breakdown section, you can now chose a new attribute to display - Data-Center Location.

  

  Learn more.

Aternity SaaS undergoes regular updates every few weeks, bringing you enhanced features, new functionality and updated dashboards.

This section lists the latest updates to Aternity SaaS. Alternatively, you can view the previous updates to Aternity.

New Installed Software Analyze Dashboard and Change API

Analyze Installed Software (Advanced) dashboard allows you to check the current software installed on each monitored device, along with its version and deployment date. Learn more.

• Use the Installed Software Analyze dashboard or REST API to analyze the current status of software deployment across your entire organization. The dashboard will assist you to answer questions, such as “who still has an old Office version” or “when was version X installed in my organization. Learn more .

  

• Use the INSTALLED_SOFTWARE_CHANGE_LOG API to monitor and analyze the history of installed software changes across the organization. Learn more.

Multi-widget Analyze (Beta)

Advanced Analyze dashboards allow you to create and save your own custom dashboards. Starting this release, the Advanced Analyze dashboards allow you to design and create multiple sections (a.k.a. widgets) inside the same dashboard, leading to more robust and useful dashboards. Instead of having many custom dashboards with a single section each, you can now create a single dashboard with all sections you need. This allows more information to be provided within one dashboard displaying much more holistic view, as well as much stronger analytics by cross filtering between the sheets.

For more information on how to open multiple dashboard sheets in Tableau, see the Tableau tutorial.

• Create and save your own custom dashboards.

• Design and create multiple sections inside the same dashboard.

• Benefit from more robust and valuable dashboards.

New Agent for Mac

Agent for Mac 3.1 is now released. It includes new features and some major improvements.

• Supports Mojave OS.

• Supports an automatic proxy detection at the device level.

• Supports Aternity Web Activity Creator (Designer and Agent).

• Includes memory consumption improvements.

• Download the Agent from the Agent's download page.

Additional Enhancements

This section describes other improvements in the current release.

• Alignment of attribute names in the Breakdowns and Filters sections in all Analyze dashboards.

  For example, Application Name is now used everywhere consistently instead of Application, or, Business Location attribute name is used consistently instead of Location.

  

• This release introduces two new direct links that allow you to embed a web link to jump from your system to Troubleshoot Device dashboard and/or User Experience dashboard.

  • You can easily embed a web link from your system to Aternity and get directly to the User Experience dashboard of a specific user.

  • You can easily embed a web link from your system to Aternity and get directly to the Troubleshoot Device Dashboard of a specific device.

    

For example, when handling a support ticket, you need to use the Troubleshoot Device dashboard. Instead of opening the Aternity and navigating to the Troubleshoot Device details, you can create a reference link to Aternity and get theTroubleshoot Device dashboard of a specific device just by one click.

To embed links from an external system into Aternity, you need the latest SaaS version. You can access the Troubleshoot Device or User Experience dashboards by entering the following links in the URL address line, respectively:

To troubleshoot a device, use the external URL of the form {system base url}/api/ui-link/account/{account id}/device/name/{device name}/troubleshoot. To create your direct link, enter to the given form the parameters explained in the below table.

For example, https://my-demo.aternity.com/api/ui-link/account/3/device/name/adam_covert_wks/troubleshoot

To troubleshoot user experience, use the external URL of the form {system based url}/api/ui-link/account/{account id}/user/{user name}/experience. To create your direct link, enter to the given form the parameters explained in the below table.

For example, https://my-demo.aternity.com/api/ui-link/account/3/user/adam_covert/experience

Enter the below parameters to create your direct link.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS October 2018.

Use SteelCentral™ License Units for Network Flow and Packet Mirroring

You can now transfer the same SteelCentral™ license units to also monitor network flows and packet mirroring on cloud servers:

To transfer license units to these features, contact Aternity SaaS Administration.

• Monitor network flows also on cloud servers.

• View all network traffic, including your cloud servers, reporting to SteelCentral NetProfiler™.

• Analyze network packets to and from a cloud server with SteelCentral AppResponse™.

• Assign license units to these features for added value in SteelCentral Suite.

Learn more.

New Analyze WiFi dashboard (Beta)

Use the new Analyze WiFi dashboard to correlate between poor WiFi and any attribute.

• Check if WiFi speed is slow in a location.

• Check if noise levels are high at specific hotspots.

• Check if a department suffers from low signal strength.

• See the impact of poor WiFi by finding users who depend more on WiFi (high usage).

Learn more.

Predefined Activities for Office 365 Web Access (Beta)

New predefined activities for Microsoft Office 365 Web Access running in web browsers.

• Monitor activities like Launch, Open Mail, Save.

• Growing list of new web activities for Office.

• Reflects growing popularity of accessing Office via a web browser.

Contact the Aternity Beta Team today to try these new activities.

Additional Enhancements

• Analyze dashboards now have longer retention up to 3 months.

• Server Time is now displayed as Backend Time. Backend time is the time required by all the servers to process data on the backend, which is part of the overall response time of an activity.

  

• Aternity's ServiceNow app for SDAs supports service providers who separate domains.

• View WiFi details of mobile devices like SSID or BSSID in any dashboard.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS August 2018.

Aternity Web Activity Creator for Web Apps in IE

Create custom activities for web applications running in Chrome and now also in Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 using Aternity Web Activity Creator (WAC) (early access):

• WAC is a Google Chrome extension.

• Use it alongside your web application in the browser to interactively create custom activities.

• Add Agent for End User Devices 9.2.5 (new) to the device for web apps in IE for better monitoring of web apps in IE11.

Learn more.

Enhancements to Aternity REST API

This version adds a new API for licensing events, and enhancements to existing APIs:

• Use LICENSE_EVENTS to view a device's most recent request to Aternity for a monitoring license, and if rejected, it displays the reason. Learn more.

  

• APIs which monitor discovered applications now also include the APPLICATION_IDENTIFIER: (Discovered applications only) Displays the process name (exe) for desktop apps, the base URL for web apps, or the package name / bundle identifier for mobile apps.

  Select or filter with this column to view one app whose public ('pretty') app name may have several variants, like notepad++.exe whose app name can be Notepad++, Notepad++ : a free (GNU) source code editor, Notepad++ (32-bit x86), or Notepad++ (64-bit x64). Alternatively, some apps may have one public ('pretty') name with several process names, like localized versions of an app. In those cases, filter by this column to split the app's measurements into each flavor.

• The INSTALLED_SOFTWARE API now includes the number of devices which have this software.

Learn more.

Agent for End User Devices 11 (Beta) Adds More Monitoring

Be among the first to try Aternity's enhanced monitoring with the new Agent 11 (beta). The Agent for End User Devices monitors end user experience by measuring device and application performance. It is a small background utility which runs on each monitored device, and reports its data to Aternity.

With Agent 11, you can:

• Monitor all sessions of a Citrix application server with a new dedicated dashboard called Troubleshoot Citrix Virtual Application Server.

  

• Report IPv6 addresses properly for devices on an IPv6 network.

• Monitor the I/O of any managed application whenever it runs on a device. Until now, Aternity only monitored the I/O per device as a whole, or during an activity.

  You can see this in Analyze Process Resources and Activity Resource Analysis when your monitored devices run Agent 11 or later.

Additional Enhancements in this Release

• In the Users page, view the members of an SSO group. Furthermore, if an SSO user accessed Aternity as part of an SSO group, you can view their group name and privileges.

  Learn more.

• You can now control the specific virtual application servers which you want to monitor, by allocating a license for a specific virtual application server. Each application server uses five license units. Learn more.

• The User menu displays the URL and username for the REST API.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS July 2018.

Software Present on your Enterprise Devices

Aternity has a new dashboard section and a new REST API that enable you to check what software is set up on Windows devices in your enterprise:

For individual devices, you can view the information in the Device Details dashboard. See what software is set up on the device, what version and type it is (Agent 9.2.3 and later), and when it was updated. Learn more.

When you troubleshoot a device on the Troubleshoot Device dashboard, you can see what software was set up within the last seven days, to assess whether new software is causing the device issue. Learn more.

Review and analyze the software inventory on many devices using the INSTALLED_SOFTWARE REST API. Learn more.

New REST APIs, Longer Retention for Data without PII

• Use INCIDENTS to view the live list of incidents which Aternity automatically opened for widespread slow performance of an activity.

• The new HOST_RESOURCES_DAILY_ANONYMIZED references 400 days of data, without PII (personally identifiable information). This complements HOST_RESOURCES_DAILY, which returns 14 days of data, including PII.

• DEVICE_HEALTH_DAILY_ANONYMIZED references 400 days of data without PII, paralleling DEVICE_HEALTH_RAW, which returns 92 days of data, including PII.

• We've increased data retention for HOST_RESOURCES_HOURLY from 14 to 30 days.

Learn more.

Aternity APM Integration Improvements for App Server Monitoring

Troubleshoot a long backend time (part of a slow response time) of a user's activity, by drilling down from the activity into Aternity APM (previously AppInternals). In Aternity APM you can trace an activity's call (APM transaction) to the server as it crosses the server-side components, and follow it across the backend components. If the activity makes two calls to the same server, or to two different servers, you can drill down from this activity to trace two separate transactions.

Updates to the AppInternals integration with Aternity include:

• Quickly toggle between Aternity and Aternity APM displays.

• Download the Agent for Application Server from the Agent Download page.

• Drill down to Aternity APM from Aternity dashboards.

Additional Enhancements

This release also includes the following enhancements:

• Aternity released Agent 9.2.5. This version of the Agent has enhanced stability, performs better when other Chrome extensions are present, and has increased reliability for error reporting.

• The Users screen has been updated with new icons, and includes SSO groups.

• The Validate Change dashboard now includes 3 months of data retention.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS May 2018.

Enhanced REST APIs for More Privacy and Better Analysis

Daily REST APIs have two variants: with PII (personally identifiable information), or anonymized APIs without PII.

• Added PII to daily application usage, daily device health and daily device resource consumption.

• APIs with PII contain up to three months of data.

• New anonymized versions of these APIs contain up to 400 days of data. The new APIs are BUSINESS_ACTIVITIES_DAILY_ANONYMIZED and APPLICATIONS_DAILY_ANONYMIZED.

• New API showing live incidents of poorly performing activities.

• New API column shows if a device was idle for this hour, to better segment your performance results.

Learn more.

New Advanced Dashboard for Analyzing Device Health Events

With the new Analyze Device Health (Advanced, Beta) dashboard, you can:

• Build your own dashboard to analyze health events.

• Correlate the occurrence of health events with any other system attribute.

• Add any dimension of health events (application, hardware or system).

• Use powerful tools to create your own formulas in your analysis.

Learn more.

New Look and Feel for User Management Page

Refreshed, modern GUI for the Users page:

• Cleaner, fresher, more intuitive look and feel.

• Manage user privileges more easily.

• Handles local users, SSO users, and user groups.

• Perform bulk operations on multiple users.

• Easily switch local users to sign is as SSO users.

Learn more.

Additional Enhancements

This release also includes the following enhancements:

• New horizontal split to the Help menu.

• Improved, shorter product tours.

• Agent Administrators can Start All and Stop All Agents.

• More attributes for better analysis in Validate dashboards.

• Updated Riverbed logo branding.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS May 2018.

Comprehensive Monitoring for Servers and End User Devices

Use your existing Aternity license units to monitor backend servers:

• End-to-end performance monitoring from the user's perspective.

• Trace slowdowns on end user devices down to the server's line of code.

• Aternity license units can float between end user devices and servers.

To transfer license units from end user devices to monitor a server, contact Aternity SaaS Administration.

Learn more.

Analyze Device Health (Beta)

Try the new Analyze Device Health (Beta) dashboard to:

• View a single health event with full details including error codes.

• Check for patterns in the occurrence of health events.

• Isolate specific types of health events.

• Correlate with locations, device types or other attributes.

Learn more.

Service Desk Alerts for Repeated Health Events

Receive service desk alerts (SDAs) when the same health event occurs several times on the same device in a given time.

• Receive SDAs via email or REST API.

• Configure rules which trigger an SDA in the Service Desk Alerts screen. Learn more.

• Integrate ServiceNow by directly entering settings into Aternity.

• Aggregate and filter SDAs by formatting your REST API query.

Learn more.

Track or Change the Devices which Report to Aternity

With the new Agents page, an administrator can:

• Start or stop specific devices reporting to Aternity as required.

• See the status of each device's Agent for End User Devices.

• Jump to a device's Troubleshoot Device or Device Details dashboards.

Learn more.

Additional Enhancements

• New tour for dashboard navigation (Help > Overview Tour).

• Run more product tours on your own data (Help > Product Tours).

• Access the customer forum from Aternity (Help > Ask a Question).

• Improvements in backend security auditing.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS April 2018.

Subscribe to Usage Analysis Alerts (Beta)

Join the beta to receive intelligent alerts when Aternity detects unexpected drops in usage.

• Aternity sends alerts when it sees unusually low numbers of activities.

• The email alert points to a dashboard showing the drop.

• Uses machine learning and advanced AI to detect anomalies.

• Only picks unusual changes, not regular low usage (like night time).

• You can investigate the reason for a drop in volume.

Troubleshoot WiFi with Riverbed Xirrus™ Integration

If you have Riverbed Xirrus™ WiFi access points, integrate with Aternity to drill down for WiFi details.

• Add Xirrus to Aternity's Integration Settings page.

• Drill down from the Troubleshoot Device dashboard.

• See the access point and its devices, or WiFi details on this device.

• You can also drill down from Xirrus to Aternity.

Learn more.

Configure Service Desk Alerts (beta) in Aternity

Aternity's service desk alerts now have a new user-facing screen inside Aternity:

• Configure the rules which trigger an SDA alert about device health via email.

• Available to beta customers who already enabled this feature.

• To configure the rules for sending alerts to ServiceNow, contact the Aternity Beta Team.

Learn more.

To enable SDA in your organization, contact Aternity Beta Team today!

Additional Enhancements

This release also includes:

• Create an SSO user group where all users have the same property (learn more).

  

• If you block access to Google's Chrome Store, switch your target to our secure proprietary store to download the Aternity Extension for Chrome.

• Run a product tour on your own data or with demo data.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS March 2018.

New Device Health and WiFi REST API

This version brings several new Aternity REST APIs, some released initially as beta:

To try this functionality, contact the Aternity Beta Team.

Better Integration with SteelCentral NetProfiler™

You can now drill down to NetProfiler from a single instance of an activity in the User Experience dashboard to see the device's surrounding network traffic at around the time of that activity.

This gives better results for devices with dynamic IPs, to troubleshoot the causes of slow network times on that activity.

Learn more.

Additional Features

• New Aternity Settings menu is more aligned with other products in the SteelCentral Suite.

  

• Select your choice of time zone just once.

• View additional device attributes in the Device Details dashboard:

  Field	Description
  Machine Power Plan	(Windows only) Displays the Windows power plan which the device uses, governing the way the computer consumes power (like display brightness, sleep and so on). You can see this in Control Panel > Power Options. The default setting is Balanced.
  MS Office License Type	(Windows only) Displays the type of license for Microsoft Office, if installed. Typically it is either Subscription for Office 365, or Volume License for more traditional license purchases.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS February 2018.

New look for Aternity dashboards

Aternity upgraded its dashboards so that they are cleaner, brighter, and easier to view. New colors and themes minimize clutter and maximize insight. There is a brand new font, custom-designed especially for the dashboards, that makes the data stand out and integrate cohesively and aesthetically with the graphics and labels on the page.

Most importantly, Aternity's new look makes it easier for you to quickly see and understand your organization's digital performance.

Longer Retention Times

Aternity has made changes in its retention of data, to allow you to see further back in time, and spot longer trends in performance.

• Access up to 13 months of data in the Analyze Business Activities (Advanced) dashboard and in the BUSINESS_ACTIVITIES_DAILY REST API.

• Access four months of data in the Analyze Applications (Advanced) dashboard and in the APPLICATIONS_DAILY REST API. With each day that passes, Aternity stores another day of this data.

• Access up to one month of hourly application and activity data in the APPLICATIONS_HOURLY and BUSINESS_ACTIVITIES_HOURLY REST APIs, and in the Analyze Applications (Advanced) and Analyze Business Activities (Advanced) dashboards, when you choose hourly aggregations.

• Aternity now stores 31 days of hourly PII (personally identifiable information).

Tour Aternity for New Users

If you are new to Aternity, the first time you sign in it invites you to take a product tour. In just a few minutes, learn about application dashboards, see how you can support troubleshooting end user problems (Help Desk), or monitor all end user devices across the organization (Service Desk).

The tours walk you through live dashboards which contain simulated demo data, to quickly help you understand the value of each dashboard. When you exit a tour, Aternity returns you to dashboards containing your own data.

You can take the tours whenever you want. Just select Help > Product Tours to return any time. Aternity tracks the tours you have completed.

Learn more about product tours.

Other Feature Enhancements

Aternity has improved the Getting Started for Admin feature. It now helps you follow up on your setup of Aternity, to ensure that you are getting the data that you need. After you complete a Getting Started task, the panel provides a link to a dashboard where you can review the results of your setup.

Learn more.

This month also brings more improvements to Aternity's REST APIs:

• You can choose any number of days or hours for relative time queries. For example, you can filter your query to return data for the last nine days. Save and rerun (refresh) your query to see nine days of data back from the day on which you run it.

• Automatically group results into weekly or monthly rows using the Calendar_Month and Calendar_Week attributes in the APPLICATIONS_DAILY and BUSINESS_ACTIVITIES_DAILY REST APIs.

Learn more about Aternity's REST APIs.

This section lists the updates to Aternity SaaS January 2018.

Aternity Agent for Mac 3.0 (Beta)

Aternity Agent for Mac 3.0 enables Aternity to monitor usage and performance of discovered web and desktop apps and includes important new functionality:

• The Agent now supports custom activities for web applications which you create in the Aternity Web Activity Creator.

• Both the Agent for End User Devices for Windows and the Aternity Agent for Mac can automatically connect to Aternity via a proxy server if you configured the device to connect that way.

Contact the Aternity Beta Team to obtain the Aternity Agent for Mac 3.0 (Beta).

Learn more about the Aternity Agent for Mac.

Monitor Mobile App Usage and Performance with Aternity Mobile 10

Monitored mobile apps report a wealth of usage and performance data. You can embed the monitoring of mobile apps, with the Aternity Mobile SDK or Aternity Wrapper. If you want to retrieve specific response times, add custom activities to your mobile apps.

New to Aternity Mobile in version 10:

• You can download the Aternity Mobile SDK from the Agent Download page. Learn more.

  You can also download the latest version of the Agent for End User Devices for Windows and the Aternity Agent for Mac from the same Agent Download page.

  

• Trace slow response times to the mobile app's back end using Aternity's integration with Aternity APM (previously AppInternals). Learn more.

Learn more about Aternity Mobile 10.

Onboarding Panel for New Aternity Administrators

The onboarding panel for new Aternity Administrators helps you through your first time configuration.

The panel guides you to:

• Download and deploy the Agent on a single device to monitor its performance.

• Once you see how monitoring works for a single device, it directs you to deploy multiple Agents. This deployment gives you a a wider picture to analyze usage and performance data.

• Add users of different types, such as those who act as administrators of Aternity, and those that require access to dashboards so that they can view and troubleshoot performance data.

  Note

  After this point, you can dismiss the panel and return to it later on from Aternity's Help menu, by selecting > Admin Onboarding.

• (Optional) Add managed applications and activities to enhance the data collected by Aternity. Learn more.

• Integrate Aternity with other SteelCentral products, such as Aternity APM and NetProfiler.

Learn more about the onboarding panel for new administrators.

Improved REST API Performance

Aternity has made improvements in the way that it handles REST API queries. This, together with the aggregation functionality provided by the $select filter in many REST APIs, results in improved query performance.

Learn more about Aternity's REST APIs.

Other Enhancements in this Release

This release also includes several other enhancements:

• The DEVICE_INVENTORY API returns the device's domain and its Microsoft stability index data.

• You can configure Aternity to send an email when poor activity performance generates an incident. With this release, those activity performance incident emails include a link to that incident.

• Aternity's response time reports the server time, network, and client time to the SteelCentral portal.