Runecast Analyzer 2.0: Major under-the-hood improvements

Runecast Analyzer 2.0 brings new and carefully crafted features that almost all our customers asked for: Historical data, PCI DSS, New UI, improved security, scalability and reliability of Runecast Analyzer. To make this happen and to pave the way for some of the future features, we incorporated the latest and greatest components for the Runecast Analyzer appliance.

We’ve tried hard to find a way to allow in-place upgrades, but we all know that even the best planned upgrades are not worry free, especially when you have to upgrade through two major versions of the OS; with all the intricate and complex dependencies of all the installed packages and Runecast Analyzer versions 1.0.0 - 1.8.1.

On top of that, all done on customer premises where we will have no visibility into what’s not working and no way to fix! As Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu noted, the complexity of in-place upgrades is quite high. It is an older article, but some of the challenges are still very much valid.

Components that were updated in Runecast Analyzer 2.0 are:

Operating System

Since most of the new components are dependent on the OS, packages and libraries, we started with the OS. Runecast Analyzer 1.x was running on Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS and in 2.0 it is running on we Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS. 

Database

This is one of the key components, so making sure it is secure, reliable and fast is vital. That’s why Runecast Analyzer 2.0 uses Postgresql 10.

Web Server

Apache Tomcat is still the web server of choice for our Java based application. We are running version 9.0.10, a big leap compared to the 7.0.88 in 1.x

Logging

There is a lot of code written for the log analysis functionality, but the core components of the analysis engine are still Logstash and Elasticsearch. We use 6.3.2, but it may happen that by the time I finish writing this, there will be a new version released by Elastic… they have incredible release cadence. But that will not be a problem since we improved our update mechanism.

Updates

The application and its dependencies are now delivered through APT. We’ve created our custom Ubuntu repository for publishing application updates and OS updates after they are fully tested by our team.

All these components combine to deliver seamless experience to you and your VMware environment. Hope you enjoy Runecast Analyzer 2.0