Staying connected is so easy nowadays that it can be a real challenge to stay focused. When you are busy investigating a user error report with Diagnostics you will now see a bell icon giving you a quick indication whether any other alerts have come in while you were analyzing. This gives you relevant context but draws your attention only if needed.

Accompanying the ‘About Diagnostics’ button is a new speaker icon for easy access to Diagnostics’ latest news items like this blog post that you are reading right now. News about upcoming events, insightful stories, version updates and more are gathered here, giving you an easy way to navigate Diagnostics’ online resources.

New proactive alert: ‘Disk Full’ expected

Since 2019 we have been adding at least 1 new alert with every release of Diagnostics, and version 2.5 is no different. The new ‘Datastore growth alert’ brings the total to 8 different types of alert that you can enable with one click.

This alert is the counterpart of the ‘Datastore growth monitor’ dashboard. The alert will draw your attention in time for you to act on the threat, while the dashboard provides more context and offers 3 ways to mitigate the risk:

  1. Set or increase superfile limit
  2. Drop old references to data
  3. Perform ds_transfer

This alert is shown via the new bell icon but will also be delivered to you through email.

Log4j to SLF4J

The recent vulnerability in log4j scared many of us around the world. Diagnostics was not affected mainly because it used version 1 of the library. The general consensus among security experts however was that it is safest to upgrade all systems around the world to the latest patched version 2 of log4j. While upgrading we concluded that log4j version 2 is too complex for our use case and hence does not comply with Diagnostics’ design principle of keeping things simple. We therefore decided to write our own simple logger to use for the internal logging of Diagnostics’ components and make this logger adhere to the SLF4J industry standard interface. This gives us all the benefits but none of the complexities. Diagnostics no longer uses log4j.

Version 2.5 of Diagnostics is now available.

Diagnostics. In control.