What's New in UAC Version 7.5

Stonebranch UAC is the key to unlocking the full potential of your hybrid IT environment. The latest version — UAC 7.5 — includes a number of enhancements that make it even more powerful and flexible.

Observability

UAC 7.5 offers greater visibility into your Stonebranch UAC environment (and the systems connected to it), so you can identify and resolve problems more quickly and easily.

Observability complements traditional monitoring by providing actionable insights based on telemetry data. Telemetry data is made up of metric, trace, and log data:

• Metric data: identify that a problem exists
• Trace data: identify where a problem exists
• Log data: identify what the problem is

UAC 7.5 provides observability enhancements that include: 

• Extended Universal Controller metrics (Prometheus) web service API. First introduced in UAC 7.1, the metrics API has been extended to provide additional metrics to support observability.
• OpenTelemetry. This new feature allows integration tasks to inject third-party application data for observability. OpenTelemetry is an open-source framework that standardizes how telemetry data is collected, formatted, and exported to backend platforms.

UAC also provides outputs that help third-party observability and application performance monitoring (APM) tools (like Splunk, Dynatrace, and DataDog) determine the state of the system and correlate that data with other data. This includes UAC-generated automation data, as well as data from any other tool that UAC connects to.

Other platforms may only provide metric data for their scheduling tool. Stonebranch, on the other hand, provides APIs for extensions to publish their telemetry data to Stonebranch. This means that UAC can collect and pass telemetry data from any tool via our integrations. In fact, starting with UAC 7.5, all Stonebranch-certified integrations provide a Grafana dashboard that displays the data of the respective integration. 

By creating this bridge, you gain a more comprehensive view of what’s happening throughout your applications and infrastructure — from modern and legacy toolsets.

Want to learn more? Check out the Observability Start-Up Guide.

SAP Automation for Business Users

Universal Automation Center has always made it easy for IT Ops users to orchestrate SAP workloads. In UAC 7.5, Stonebranch shares the love with business users by introducing an enhanced guided interface. This new UX option looks and feels very familiar to those who typically work within SAP ECC or S/4HANA.

UAC now offers users two view choices: the legacy view and the enhanced view. 

• Enhanced view is ideal for business users. Easy-to-navigate menus enable users to customize job categories, create email notifications, select connection types, plus set-up log retrievals, result processing, and SLAs for late starts and late finishes. UAC dynamically populates these menus with real-time data from SAP. 
• Legacy view offers technical users the same familiar interface they’ve always used to automate SAP jobs. This includes the ability to use scripts, for those that prefer a more developer-centric approach.

It’s also easier than ever for technical and business users to customize dashboards and reports. All SAP workloads in UAC are supported by a real-time integration with ERP, business intelligence, database, and other SAP tools.

As always, as part of the UAC, the Stonebranch Universal Connector for SAP enables you to orchestrate SAP jobs and non-SAP jobs from a single platform. 

Universal System Events for Webhooks

In UAC 7.5, task instance status events are now available for the outbound webhook feature. When using outbound webhooks, you can seamlessly publish events globally to third-party applications. The addition of these new event types allows a more flexible and powerful method to manage third-party integrations for activities such as monitoring, notifications, or problem ticket creation.

Outbound webhooks are available for several UAC event types and more will be added with each future release. They provide a consolidated console for managing your third-party application integrations with UAC events. 

Modern Event-based Orchestration

The capability for universal system events for webhooks builds upon Universal Monitors (UM), Universal Events (UE), and Universal Triggers (UT), which were released within UAC 7.3 and 7.4. In UAC 7.5, the overall architecture is a foundational approach designed to make it easier and less expensive to orchestrate applications and infrastructure based in the cloud. 

With the culmination of these enhancements, you can monitor third-party tools for system events. When a system event is detected, it will be used to trigger orchestration workflows in real-time. 

Events are published globally, which allows them to trigger any workflow or webhook that is subscribed. This approach helps you avoid using workarounds like time-based API polling, which often adds additional cost per API poll over time. 

Additional Enhancements

• Previous Task Instance Wait. Customers can now set their frequently scheduled tasks to be directly dependent on previous versions of themselves from within the workflow or task definition. This avoids using additional task monitors for these dependencies, helping simplify complex workflows.
• Undo / Redo for Trigger Enable or Disable. When performing mass actions against a filtered list of triggers, usually required for maintenance operations, the user can now simply go the audit to reverse a previous action when mass enabling or disabling triggers.
• New Self-Service Configurations. For users who use the UAC UI to manage their ad-hoc automation requirements, we have introduced some new configuration options to improve this experience and help ensure that the proper optional parameters are provided.

Universal Automation Center 7.5

In addition to the enhancements discussed above, UAC 7.5 offers additional updates. See the full technical update in the Stonebranch documentation for Universal Controller and Universal Agent. To learn more, hear from Colin Cocksedge, director of product management, during this on-demand  Product Update – UAC 7.5: What’s New in the Latest Release.