Release notes, Paragon Active Assurance software version 3.1.0¶

Introduction¶

General notes¶

Please note that not all features of Paragon Active Assurance are available to every customer; rather, availability is dependent on what product or service has been purchased.

Upgrading to this version¶

In this version, an additional plugin package needs to be installed. For details, see the Upgrade Guide.
This version introduces a new configuration file /etc/netrounds/plugin.yaml. During installation, this file needs to be updated with the correct database connection details if the latter have been changed from the default.
Backup procedures need to be extended to cover the new technologies introduced in this version. For full details, see the Operations Guide, chapter “Backing Up Product Data”.

New and changed features¶

Streaming API¶

A streaming API and client have been added to Paragon Active Assurance. This API allows export of all data in Paragon Active Assurance to an external system. Data streaming is managed by the well-known and highly scalable Kafka event streaming platform.

Using the streaming API is optional, and it is offered only for on-premise Control Center installations.

Please note that the streaming API has only been tested with up to 15,000 streams.

Test Agent on Raspberry Pi¶

Paragon Active Assurance supports installation of Test Agent Applications on Raspberry Pi platforms.

Test Agent for ARM architecture¶

Paragon Active Assurance supports installation of Test Agent Applications on ARM processor hardware (32-bit and 64-bit architectures). These Test Agents work identically to the 64-bit AMD versions which have been previously (and are still) offered.

DNS testing with Test Agent Application¶

The DNS test and monitor task has been implemented for Test Agent Applications. It works the same way as for Test Agent Appliances.

Two configurable TWAMP percentiles¶

It is now possible to specify and present two percentiles for TWAMP delay values to get a clearer view of their distribution. Commonly used percentiles include the 90th and 99th, which mean, respectively, “90% (99%) of the data points are below this value”. The percentiles in Paragon Active Assurance are however freely configurable.

Configurable sender port for TWAMP¶

A sender (source) port can optionally be set for a TWAMP reflector in the Paragon Active Assurance inventory. If no sender port is set, the system will use a random port as before.

This is useful for reflectors that require test and source ports to be known in advance.

Moving a Test Agent to a different Control Center¶

If you have multiple Paragon Active Assurance Control Centers deployed, you can now move a Test Agent permanently from one Control Center to another by a simple action in the Control Center GUI. You specify the new Control Center host, the port to connect to, and the new credentials.

Offline registration of Test Agents¶

In certain situations, especially when deploying a large number of Test Agents, you may find it convenient to first preconfigure the Test Agents with registration details without being dependent on network connectivity, and register them only later. This can now be done using an Offline registration utility in the Test Agent local console.

Test Agent Application: Register and start in one command¶

When installing a Test Agent Application as a native app in Linux, you can use a new shortcut (register-run command) which first registers the Test Agent with Control Center and then starts it.

Dynamic plugins¶

Plugins are used by Test Agent Applications to execute test and monitoring tasks. It is now possible to upload new plugins for use dynamically, that is, in between releases, and also to switch more easily between different versions of a particular plugin.

Improved dashboard rendering performance¶

To speed up the presentation on the Control Center dashboard for large sets of monitors, the monitor list is now by default sorted by a precomputed and cached 15-minute SLA indicator. SLA indicators for other time intervals can be displayed in parallel on the dashboard.

DNS: Request lifetime expiry reporting¶

A new DNS KPI, “ES lifetime”, keeps track of how often no DNS response was obtained before the “Request lifetime” period expired. Contrasting this with the “ES response” KPI, you can distinguish late responses from instances where no response was received at all.

Tech preview: TimescaleDB¶

Note

This feature is made available in version 3.1.0 as a tech preview. This means that it is offered for customers to inspect and explore, while Juniper Networks does not guarantee satisfactory performance and does not take responsibility for malfunctions or data loss. By default the feature is disabled.

A TimescaleDB time-series database is introduced in Paragon Active Assurance to provide enhanced ingestion performance and scalability. More specifically, it enables connecting an external dashboard and retrieving metrics.

Saving data in the TimescaleDB database is optional; please note that if you turn this on, data will be saved in two places in parallel. The long-term plan for data storage in Paragon Active Assurance is for TimescaleDB to replace the existing time-series database.

TimescaleDB is offered only for on-premise Control Center installations.

Deprecated features¶

Authentication using TACACS+¶

Authentication by means of TACACS+ is no longer supported. Going forward, Paragon Active Assurance supports authentication using LDAP.

Known issues¶

Please refer to the version of these release notes found at https://www.juniper.net/documentation/product/en_US/paragon-active-assurance.

Resolved issues¶