Upgrading Operations Dashboard

Note: If you plan to use transaction tracing and troubleshooting (Operations Dashboard), be sure to upgrade that before upgrading any of the capabilities it is tracing.

Upgrading the Operations Dashboard involves:

  1. Upgrading the Operations Dashboard operator using the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM).

  2. Upgrading the Operations Dashboard deployment by editing the Operations Dashboard custom resource (CR).

  3. Upgrading the traced integration capabilities (optional).

These operations can be configured to happen automatically, or they can be initiated manually.

Upgrading the operator

The OLM attempts to upgrade an operator when a new version is available to the cluster.

  • Automatic approval - If the Operations Dashboard operator subscription is set to Automatic approval, no action is required.

  • Manual approval - If the subscription is set to Manual approval, a Cluster Administrator must approve the InstallPlan created by OLM to upgrade the operator.

    • You approve the InstallPlan by clicking Operators > Installed Operators in the OpenShift console.

    • The upgrade status under Subscription displays as "Upgrading" until the user reviews and approves its Install Plan.

    • After confirming approval on the Install Plan page, the subscription upgrade status changes to "Up to date".

Upgrading the operand

An upgraded Operations Dashboard operator may support new versions of the Operations Dashboard.

  • Automatic upgrade - If your Operations Dashboard CR spec.version is set to a channel, and the operator supports a newer version in that channel, your Operations Dashboard deployment is automatically upgraded. To automatically upgrade to the latest version available, also set the spec.version value in the CR to latest. You also need to add a valid spec.license.license value of CP4I or CP4I_LIMITED.

  • Manual upgrade - If your Operations Dashboard spec.version is set to a specific version, upgrade your Operations Dashboard by updating the spec.version in the Operations Dashboard CR. You also need to add a valid spec.license.license value of CP4I or CP4I_LIMITED.

Users can also identify what versions are available to a given instance of a Operations Dashboard (for upgrade or downgrade) by looking at the status.versions.available section of a Operations Dashboard CR.

Troubleshooting: You may get validation errors while trying to upgrade the operand. Workaround:

  • Edit the URL to access the v1beta2 custom resource, so that the end of the URL is /integration.ibm.com~v1beta2~OperationsDashboard/cp4i-od-dev/yaml.

  • Update the custom resource value for spec.license so that it accepts the Cloud Pak for Integration license.

Upgrading the traced integration capabilities

IBM recommends that once you have upgraded the instance of Operations Dashboard, you also upgrade the integration capabilities that are traced by that instance of Operations Dashboard to the same version as the instance. Doing so ensures that you enjoy the latest features of Operations Dashboard.

Backward compatibility with older versions of integration capabilities

Operations Dashboard can receive distributed tracing data from IBM Cloud Pak for Integration capabilities of older versions with the following limitations:

  • Only versions 2020.3.1 and 2020.2.1 are supported.

  • The sampling policy cannot be adjusted, and is always be set to the default (10%).

  • Some new features of Operations Dashboard, such as excluding internal MQ services from generating traces, may not be available.

Upgrade procedures for previous versions