What's new in IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps 4.8.0

Get a quick overview of what is new with IBM Cloud Pak® for AIOps.

IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps leverages AI to streamline IT operations, increase uptime, improve efficiency, and reduce costs. The solution supports Operations teams to deliver optimum performance and assurance by:

  • Breaking down data silos
  • Providing real-time insights into IT systems
  • Augmenting incident management with AI
  • Automating incident resolution

With Version 4.8.0, IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps delivers improved capabilities and new features for installing, runbooks, integrating with Instana, and more.

Overall, the following new features and changes are introduced with this IBM Cloud Pak version:

Install and upgrade

  • Elasticsearch is replaced by OpenSearch (IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Red Hat® OpenShift®) Note that deployments of IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Linux already use OpenSearch. The following updates have been made to support this transition:

    • An OpenSearch filter is added to the ibm-pak mirror-manifests command in the offline installation and upgrade topics. Learn more
    • The upgrade topics are updated to migrate from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch. Learn more
    • The Backup and restore with OADP procedures create a new network policy, and add a new esBackupPVC parameter. Learn more
    • There are updates to various topics that reference Elasticsearch.

  • (Nonproduction) Multi-zone high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) (IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Red Hat OpenShift). This feature continues to be hardened, but remains a technology preview. Installation topics are updated with the ability to create an installation resource for a multi zone cluster. Learn more.

  • Resizing storage (IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Red Hat OpenShift) The method for increasing PVC sizes for Cassandra, Postgres, Elasticsearch, and Kafka is updated in v4.8.0. Learn more.

  • Offline deployments no longer retrieve catalogs from the CASE file (IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Red Hat OpenShift). Offline installation and upgrade procedures are updated for this. Learn more: Offline install and Offline upgrade.

  • Changes to image mirroring (IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Red Hat OpenShift) Image mirroring for offline deployments now uses the aiopsctl bastion <..> command instead of podman. For more information, see Offline installation: Mirror images and Offline upgrade: Mirror the images.

  • Renewed certificate (IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Red Hat OpenShift) The certificate that is used to sign the IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps images has been renewed, and the new public key is listed in Verifying images. This only affects you if you want to verify the IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps images.

  • New minimum Netcool Operations Insight version requirement (IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Red Hat OpenShift) If IBM® Netcool® Operations Insight® is installed on the same cluster, it must be at version 1.6.13 or higher. Learn more.

  • Incremental adoption (IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps on Linux) Deployment mode is now configured with a command line argument instead of with a configuration file. Learn more

Defining integrations (connections)

  • Instana integration: You can now use the Instana Observer instead of the Instana Connector to retrieve topology data from an integration with Instana. Note that the Instana Connector will continue to collect event and metric data, but not topology data.

Resolving incidents and alerts

  • Scope-based grouping explainability: When viewing an incident's alert list, and the selected alert is part of an alert group, the Alert details side panel displays information about the underlying temporal, topological, or scope-based groups. For scope-based groupings, you can now click the link Scope-based policy associated to this alert to go directly to the associated policy in the Policies UI.

Managing user access control

  • New read-only permission: The new View operational data permission provides users with read-only access to Cloud Pak for AIOps. The Manage operational data permission is required to make changes to alerts, incidents, filters, and views. For more information, see Basic operations permissions.

    Important: After upgrading to IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps 4.8.0, users will not be able to perform some tasks until the following permissions are added to existing roles:

    • Manage operational data
    • Use runbooks
    • View topologies

Managing applications (services) and viewing topologies

  • New Instana Observer: For an integration with Instana, you can now use an Observer integration instead of the previously available integration (Connector type) integration. With this Observer integration, you can retrieve topology data from an integration with Instana.

    Note: The existing Instana (Connector) integration continues to collect event and metric data, but not topology data.

Automating processes (Policies, Runbooks, Actions)

  • Runbook improvements:

    • You can now administer conditional branching for semi-automated runbooks, as well as fully automated runbooks. For more information, see Adding actions.

    • Automation HTTP actions and client-side actions can now reference unencrypted HTTP endpoints. For more information, see Creating HTTP actions and Creating Client-side actions.

    • There is a new example runbook for expanding Kafka broker storage. For more information, see Sample runbooks with special administrative use cases.

    • Users with the read-only permission View runbooks can browse runbooks, actions, and activities. They can not run any runbooks and actions.

Non-production (tech preview)

  • Visualizing analytics with IBM Cognos Analytics:, the supported capabilities when integrating with IBM Cognos Analytics are improved:

    • You can integrate with IBM Db2 to store alert and incident data in the Db2 database. With this integration, you can create policies to send the alert or incident data from IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps to populate a dashboard or report in IBM Cognos® Analytics.

      For more information about creating this integration, see Creating an IBM Db2 integration. For more information about using policies to send data for a dashboard or report, see Populating a dashboard or report.

    • A new Incident list widget and Button widget are available for use in building a custom dashboard. For more information about the available widgets that you can use, see IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps widgets within IBM Cognos Analytics.

    • Example dashboards are now available to help you learn about the capabiltities of the available widgets and to help you create your own dashboard. For more information about creating a dashboard, see Creating a dashboard.

    Overall, this integration provides you with additional tools to create custom dashboards and reports to visualize and analyze your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps data. When you set up this integration, you can open IBM Cognos Analytics from the Cloud Pak for AIOps console and begin using IBM Cognos Analytics dashboards to build visualizations of your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps data, such as alert and topology data.

  • Additional feature previews: In addition to the integration with IBM Cognos Analytics, IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps includes the following components and features for non-production use as a technology preview:

    • Incident (Story) prioritization from persistence analysis and golden signals extraction
    • Multi-zone high availability and disaster recovery (HADR)
    • New data collection functionality for Dynatrace integration

For more information about these feature previews, see Non-production features (Technology preview).

Infrastructure Automation

  • IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps integration improvements: The integration between Infrastructure Automation and IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps is improved so that metric data can be sent to IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps in addition to the existing sending of event and inventory data. Metric data syndication is also available through the integration in addition to the existing event and inventory data syndication.

  • Upgrade capability: You can now upgrade from Version 4.4.x to Version 4.8.0.

Security and compliance

  • Fixed security vulnerabilities: Fixes and updates are included to address reported security-related vulnerabilities with IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps. For more information about the included fixes, see Security bulletins and fixes.

Documentation changes

In addition to the documentation for the preceding new and changed features, the following documentation is updated:

  • Enrich incidents by using IBM Tivoli Netcool/Impact policy: If needed, you can enrich Cloud Pak for AIOps incidents with data from external systems. For more information, see Enriching an incident.

  • Maintaining and debugging automation policies: Effectively maintain your IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps policies and debug issues that might arise. Determine what policies are firing for alerts, find policies that are related to incidents, and use the policy table to discover policy usage and issues. For more information, see Maintaining and debugging automation policies.

Previously introduced features and changes

For more information about new features and changes that were introduced in previous versions of IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps, see: