CloudOps 2024.1 Latest

July 2024

The 2024.1 release introduces our first major feature of 2024, which is our initial version of CloudOps Alerting. Alerting builds upon the data and insights already provided within CloudOps from a live and historic perspective to provide proactive alerts when this data & insights indicate anomalies, such as but not limited to performance and cost anomalies. Alert notifications are fully customisable, allowing users to choose to be alerted via email and/or push notifications for each of the available categories of alerts (General, Cost, Monitoring & Custom).

  • New Features

    Alerting: General

    The new Alerting feature includes its own dedicated area with a Recent Alerts page which displays all historic alerts (latest to oldest) colour coded to indicate if the underlying issue which triggered the alert is still active or not. Additionally, two indicators have been added to the main dashboard, one to give an overview of the number of alerts by status within the last 4 hours and another to indicate the current user's preferences for receiving alerts.

    In this release we have added a number of Alert Types:

    • General: General alerts may be sent from time to time which will be related to CloudOps but not necessarily a Cloud Resource.
    • Cost: Cost alerts will be sent with regards to the current or historical cost of a Cloud Resource.
    • Monitoring: Monitoring alerts will be sent with regards to current or historical state or metrics of a Cloud Resource.
    • Custom: Custom alerts can be configured specifically for a customer depending on their needs.

    All alert type's can be delivered via the following notification channels:

    • Email: Rich HTML e-mails for each alert including a link to a relevant CloudOps page if applicable.
    • Push Notification: Browser push notifications for each alert, which when clicked will link to a relevant CloudOps page if applicable. Any operating system which supports browser Push Notifications is supported, including Android.
    Monitoring: Alerting

    Alerts are raised when CloudOps monitoring detects an issue with the state or performance metrics of a cloud resource across both AWS & Azure:

    • Virtual Machines
      • Not Running/Stopped
      • High CPU Utilisation
      • Low Memory
    • Database Server
      • Not Running/Stopped
      • High CPU Utilisation
      • Low Memory
      • Low Storage (AWS RDS Only)
    • Web Server (Azure App Service support only)
      • Not Running/Stopped
      • High CPU Utilisation
      • Low Memory
      • Excessive Request Queue Length

    Note: The above resources support is dependant on those supported by the Standard Monitoring Feature.

    Cost: Alerting

    Alerts are raised when a cost increase is detected any of the following cloud resources across both AWS & Azure:

    • Virtual Machines
    • Database Server
    • Web Server (Azure App Service support only)

    Note: The above resources support is dependant on those supported by the cost feature.

    Custom: Alerting

    Custom alerting allows customer specific alerts to be setup in collaboration with IG CloudOps in the event that the pre-configured alerts don't meet all customer requirements.

  • Enhancements

    Cost: Recommendations Daily Digest

    The daily digest with Cost Recommendations has been updated to HTML to display recommendations more clearly.

8th July 2024

CloudOps 2023.3

November 2023

Our 2023.3 release has been focused on providing more access to historical data across Cloud retrieved data, specifically adding historical metric features to Standard Monitoring to provide a closer experience as that of Enhanced Monitoring, and expanding on the cost indicator from the previous release by providing the ability to view how the cost of a resource has changed over time. Self-Service user management is now generally available, allowing users with the Administrator role to create and manage organisation users directly.

  • New Features

    Monitoring: Historical Metrics (Standard Monitoring)

    Standard Monitoring now supports historical metrics, brining Standard Monitoring more in-line with the features available for Enhanced Monitoring. Historical Metrics allows viewing data trends for all supported metrics as far back as when the Cloud connection was initially created and while you have an active IG CloudOps Subscription.

    Historical Metrics are available via each monitored service resource, supporting:

    Cost: Historical Costs

    In addition to Live Costs and the cost trends for supported resources, it is now possible to view the historical costs for resources to provide auditability over time and help track more volatile cost resources such as Spot instances.

    Cost History is available via each service resource, supporting:

    Note: Retrospective costs are not provided prior to this release.

    CloudOps Service: Self-Service User Management

    The CloudOps Service section has been updated to include a list of your organisations users who have an account to access IG CloudOps.

    Users with the "Administrator" role can now manage all of your organisations users, including:

    • Creating New Users
    • Updating User details
    • Changing a User's Role
    • Resetting Passwords
    • Deleting Users
    Cost: Reservations

    A new Reservations section has been added to the Cost area where reservation details are retrieved from configured Clouds and surfaced within the UI directly. This provides a consolidated view of current and past reservations along with expiry dates across all Clouds and Regions.

    Note: Due to API limitations, Reservations are currently only supported for AWS, Azure will be added in the future when a suitable API is provided.

  • Enhancements

    Support: Cloud Provider Incidents

    Improvements have been made in how Cloud Provider incidents provided which allows the checks for new incidents to be done more often so that the delay of incidents displaying in the CloudOps portal is reduced.

    24/7 Interface & Feedback

    The 24/7 interface has had a UI refresh to bring it inline with other areas within the CloudOps portal. Additionally, based on customer feedback, when a 24/7 incident is escalated via calling a 1st Line Agent, a copy of the incident and details regarding the next steps are provided post-call via email.

    UI Performance

    The performance of the UI has been improved for most data views through the use of browser caching for data which is unlikely to have changed since the page was last reloaded. This will be most noticeable for those using the Auto-Refresh feature on the main dashboard along with those who have a large number of cloud resources when paging backwards and forwards through resource lists/tables.

29th November 2023

CloudOps 2023.2

July 2023

Our 2023.2 release has been focused on features and improvements for customers with multiple Cloud Accounts and larger number of resources deployed within those accounts. Major improvements have been made to optimise the retrieval of monitoring data from Cloud Providers and the inclusion of a new Cloud Account filter which works across the CloudOps portal provides granular data for a single or all Cloud Accounts. Building on the design of the dashboard from the last release for use on large displays, the dashboard now has the ability to enable automatic refresh without the need for a third party browser plugin or external scripting. Additionally, the first iteration of historic costing data via the 30 Day Trend indicator now gives an at-a-glance view of your Cloud Cost growth or reduction and allows granular comparison for individual resources.

  • Cloud Account Filtering New Feature

    Customers with multiple cloud accounts can now filter their CloudOps interface by these accounts. The filtering is set in the header bar and is persisted across pages and also browser sessions. Filtering is applied to the following information & areas:

    To assist users when identifying which account to filter, we have also added the capability to set and update a display name for each Cloud Account to make them easily identifiable.

    Note: Existing Cost Recommendations and Risks will be updated with the associated Cloud Account during your next Cost Review and Security Audit, until this time items will only appear when viewing across all Cloud Accounts.

  • Dashboard Auto-Refresh New Feature

    Some customers have started using the Dashboard on displays within their offices for live monitoring and incident response. Previously, a browser plugin was required to have the page refreshed with the latest data, however, we have now added the ability to have the page refresh on a variety of different times within CloudOps directly. The auto-refresh time can be set using the selector in the top right of the Dashboard page.

  • Cost - 30 Day Rolling Trend Indicator New Feature

    Previous updates to Cost integration now allows CloudOps to use historical cost data. In this release all cost items now include a 30 Day Trend which provides an indicator as to cost stability, increases or decreases over the last two 30 day periods. These have been applied to the Dashboard roll-ups and resource specific costs:

  • Monitoring - Performance Improvement

    Major performance improvements have been added to Standard Monitoring where data is collected in the background and stored for both speed of access and future inclusion of historical display, similar to that available for Enhanced Monitoring.

  • Risks - Tracking Improvement

    Risks have been updated to include a tracking status where each risk is now classified as Active, Acknowledged or Mitigated to capture the lifecycle of each risk as it is being addressed. This was a popular request from customers who needed to track a risk instead of them simply being deleted once mitigated.

17th July 2023

CloudOps 2023.1

March 2023

In this release, we have focused on expanding the Cloud Service support and Security. Cloud Service support has been expanded beyond Virtual Machines for both Monitoring and Cost areas. A new Security menu has been added which now contains the Risk Register and the new automated Penetration Testing features. Monitoring in particular has been expanded to support monitoring metrics from within software via Prometheus supported metric endpoints.

  • Monitoring - Standard & Enhanced New Feature

    A new Standard Monitoring variation has been introduced where monitoring metrics are retrieved directly from configured Cloud's and surfaced within the UI directly. This provides several out of the box improvements compared with previous monitoring capabilities such as:

    • No agent deployment is required, once a cloud profile is added, monitoring will start providing metrics within approx. 15 minutes.
    • Service support for monitoring is expanded to cover more cloud service offerings, in this release that includes:

    Standard Monitoring provides turn-key monitoring, however, the metrics available are limited to the metrics made available by the Cloud Provider for their service, therefore, in order to distinguish and to better represent the capabilities of the new and original monitoring, the original monitoring has been termed Enhanced Monitoring. Enhanced Monitoring provides a wealth of metrics and capabilities, however, these can only be achieved through the deployment of a monitoring agent which may not be feasible for all customers, environments and cloud services.

  • Cost - Additional Cloud Service Support New Feature

    Live costs for Virtual Machines has been available for some time, this has now been expanded to support additional cloud services:

  • Application Monitoring New Feature

    Monitoring cloud workloads at an infrastructure and platform level is good, however, improving cloud operations and observability can greatly benefit from in-application monitoring too. Application Monitoring allows any software exposing metrics in Prometheus format to be monitoring without having to deploy and manage Prometheus directly. Out of the box dashboards are provided for:

    • Connectivity - Allows monitoring availability and response times at the application level
    • Web Applications - Allows monitoring the health of Web Application's requests pipelines, including historical trends.

    We are looking to expand the out of the box dashboards moving forwards, therefore, please contact your account manager if there is an application of interest which we do not currently support.

  • Security - Penetration Testing New Feature

    Automated Penetration Testing is now available for use to scan publicly accessible Websites & Web Applications. Our automated penetration testing provides approx. 80% of the coverage of a costly manual penetration test, enabling you to address many possible vulnerabilities as part of your existing services.

  • Dashboard Improvement

    The dashboard has been updated to account for the expansion of monitoring and cost information while also focusing on a page which can be used by Cloud Operations teams on large displays in control rooms to provide an at-a-glance view of the health of their Cloud Estates.

2nd March 2023
CloudOps 2022.3
October 2022

Although there are some visible updates, the majority of this release has been behind the scenes improving our Cloud Integration ready for the expansion of IG CloudOps to provide more features for Cloud Services other than Virtual Machines, which we're excited to offer in 2023. That being said, we have some major security improvements along with the usual performance improvements and fixes.

  • Cloud Integration - Direct New Feature

    Previously, Cloud Integration was achieved using a collection of tools and services which had limitations such as the Cloud Service we could integrate with and how the costs were collected and calculated. Cloud Integration has been re-developed from scratch specifically for IG CloudOps and now talks directly to AWS and Azure APIs, allowing us to connect more securely and provide improved IG CloudOps support for current and future additional Cloud Services.

    This direct integration provides the following improvements:

    • Live VM costs no longer requires Monitoring to be deployed to the VMs
    • Live VM costs are available for all VMs in all of your Cloud Accounts which are added to IG CloudOps, regardless of your IG CloudOps Managed VM allocation
    • Costs are updated more frequently (currently every 15 minutes)
    • Costs now support a wider range of SKUs such as Spot Instance
    • In alignment with AWS and Azure base pricing, all costs are now provided in the cloud provider's base currency of USD

  • Replaced Cloud Credentials with Cloud Profiles New Feature

    Cloud Credentials have been removed and replaced with a system where you delegate access to IG CloudOps instead. IG CloudOps will now access your Clouds using its own credentials, which is more secure and follows the best practices from both AWS and Microsoft Azure. This allows us to manage IG CloudOps' credentials securely, rotating access keys more frequently without customer intervention and limiting permissions to only those required.

    • AWS: CloudFormation templates for easy setup
    • AWS: Require the use of an External ID
    • Azure: ARM templates for easy setup based on Azure Lighthouse

  • Self-Service Sign-up New Feature

    New customers can now use the Sign-up Portal to provision their own IG CloudOps account, including connecting IG CloudOps to AWS & Azure. Including prospective customers who may be interested in IG CloudOps but want to try the IG CloudOps Core offering before purchasing.

  • Subscriptions Improvement

    Contract information has replaced with IG CloudOps Subscriptions, which provide more agreement details, including all entitlements and additional offerings available for upgrade.

    • Support hours are now allocated and calculated based on Subscription anniversary instead of calendar year.
    • Advisory hours are now allocated and calculated based on Subscription anniversary instead of calendar year.

19th October 2022
CloudOps 2022.2
June 2022

The main focus of this release was a major update to the Navigation and UI. The features we have been rolling out over the past 12 months and those we are planning for the next 12 months has meant that the existing navigation and UI was becoming crowded, cumbersome and frankly no-longer fit for purpose. In addition, we have been able to bring forward supporting Kubernetes Monitoring and made some improvements to the monitoring metrics access along with the usual performance improvements and fixes.

  • Navigation & UI Re-design New Feature

    The Navigation and User Interface of IG CloudOps has been re-designed to align with the IG CloudOps service areas and provide a more scalable navigation for upcoming features and functionality. Each of the IG CloudOps Service Areas now has its own dedicated navigation area along with at least an Overview page providing a summary of your IG CloudOps Service status and health.

  • Monitoring - Kubernetes New Feature

    IG CloudOps Monitoring now supports monitoring of Kubernetes Cluster Worker Nodes (both managed and unmanaged). The worker node monitoring supports both Azure's AKS and AWS' EKS managed Kubernetes Clusters as well as self-provisioned clusters such as those created with KubAdm.

  • Monitoring - Historical Metrics Improvement

    In the previous release historical metrics were limited to 48 hours, in this release we have added additional time-periods so that you now have access to 24 hours, 48 hours, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days and 365 days of metrics. We have also included the ability for you to select a custom period by specifying a start and end date.

    The metrics can be accessed from the Monitoring > Virtual Machines home page by either clicking on the live metric or using the dropdown menu of the VM and selecting Historical Metrics or Historical Metrics (Custom) item.

16th June 2022
CloudOps 2022.1
March 2022

We have been busy over the Christmas period adding new foundation features to IG CloudOps which will be expanded on in the near future such as the Historical Metrics and Notifications. We have also added some IG CloudOps Services which were missing from the portal along with details on their provisioning.

  • Monitoring - Historical Metrics New Feature

    We have expanded the Monitoring data available through the IG CloudOps Portal allowing you to view data trends for CPU, Memory, Disk and Availability for the last 48 hours.

    The metrics can be accessed from the home page by either clicking on the live metric or using the dropdown menu of the VM and selecting Historical Metrics.

  • Notifications New Feature

    A new notifications feature has been added which will send you daily digest emails if any updates have been added to your IG CloudOps portal. At the moment, notifications are limited to Cost Recommendations and you can opt-out of these notifications through the new My Preferences area accessible from the user menu in the top right.

  • Cloud Credentials New Feature

    Cloud Credentials has been added to the Settings menu which allows you to manage the credentials used by IG CloudOps Automation to perform tasks on your AWS Accounts or Azure Subscriptions. Multiple credentials can be added and each credential can be used for 1 or more AWS Accounts/Azure Subscriptions to simplify the management and auditing of access.

    Cloud Credentials created and setup by IG CloudOps for your own AWS Accounts or Azure Subscriptions will also be visible here.

  • Service Settings New Feature

    Backup and Antivirus IG CloudOps Service Settings have been added to the Service Settings page. We are also evaluating the feasibility of allowing Service settings to be disabled without needing to contact your account manager, this applies to the Backup setting only at this moment in time.

    Additionally, a Services Summary widget has been added to the home page showing which services you have requested. We have also added in two states (Provisioning and Deprovisioning) to highlight which services are currently being setup or decommissioned.

  • What's New Page New Feature

    A What's new page has been added to the User Menu which provides a summary of main releases along with the features and improvements added within each release

  • Auditing New Feature

    Additional behind the scenes Auditing has been added for both Login/Authentication and 24/7 Call events.

  • Patching Terminology Improvement

    Patching Windows have been re-named Patching Schedules to avoid any confusion with operating systems.

  • 24/7 Job Roll-up Improvement

    A roll-up version of the Recovery Job History from the 24/7 Dashboard has been added to the home page allowing an at-a-glace view of any recovery jobs across all your customers.

14th March 2022
CloudOps 2021.4
December 2021

In this release we have focused on adding and improving the IG CloudOps Service Performance information available through the portal and added new Cost Control functionality which provides live costing insights along with the usual performance improvements and fixes.

  • Live Cost Insights New Feature

    A new Live Costs page has been added to the Cost Control area and a overview widget on the home page for quick reference purposes. Live Costs provides insights into your cloud spend and the breakdown of each resource in pseudo real-time with a maximum delay 5 minutes. This version supports the insights for Virtual Machines (VMs) compute, however this is just the beginning and we plan to extend this in future releases for other cloud resource types.

  • Service Performance Improvement

    A new Product Summary widget has been added to the Performance page within the Service area which displays the details about your IG CloudOps Product such as the start date, minimum term and your key contacts. Additionally, a new SLAs widget has been added which will be replacing the metrics originally included on the Service Performance widget with more detailed metrics which include your personal IG CloudOps Product targets along with a RAG traffic light system to highlight any short-comings.

  • Account Meeting Roll-up Improvement

    Meetings with your Account Manager are taking on a new look via a new Customer Dashboard which will include the performance metrics included in this release along with additional information such as actions/tasks including status from your previous meetings and any out-of-meeting long term requests/objectives.

6th December 2021