exMon 3.9 – Release Notes

We have been busy working on exMon 3.9 with most of our focus being on stability and usability improvements.

Below are the improvements we made but first we would like to point out our blog posts about:
– How to prioritize and assess which checks to implement in exMon
– How to structure email alert flow in exMon.

They are the first two parts of our series about best practices when implementing exMon Continuous Monitoring.

Here are the improvements we made in exMon 3.9:

Querying multiple data providers

If you have same or similar data in multiple databases, for example a Point of sales database in each of your stores, then creating tests results in lots of duplication.

In exMon 3.9 we introduce Data Provider Groups. With Data Provider Groups you can add all your stores into a group and create tests that will validate each data provider in the group.
With this you can create a single test that monitors that product prices are correct in all your stores.

You can read more in our blog post about Data Provider Groups.

Process Group Improvements

exMon 3.8 came with support for more complex process groups with sub steps and better way to control what happens on failure in each step.

exMon 3.9 improves the editing experience a lot with more intuitive controls for adding steps, moving steps and moving objects between steps.

We also added:

• Drag and drop support between steps
• Ability to rename steps
• Execution jobs now use your steps instead of object groups
• You can select which steps to execute when running the process from the portal
• You can choose to run the process From last good known location. The process finds the first object that failed last time it ran and runs from there.

Other Improvements

exMon Portal

• Better error page when user does not have access to a particular system or feature on the portal
• Adding and renaming systems does no longer require IIS restart

exMon Administrator

• Schedule groups now display which timezone the server is on if it’s different from local computer
• View dependencies for users now looks up which Active Directory groups the user belongs to
• View dependencies for Active Directory groups now looks up which users belong in an Active Directory
• Moving objects to different systems would not work if there were only 2 systems in exMon
• Warn before saving an illegal email address for users

exMon Execution Agent

• When trying to send emails to illegal email addresses, the email address would not be displayed in the error message

Exception Manager

• exMon now updates changed values for existing exceptions
• Marking an exception as “Not an exception” on Development would cause it to never open on Production

exMon Installer

• Support SQL Server instances on a different port than standard