OMG, I missed Pi Day! | SUSE Communities

OMG, I missed Pi Day!

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After blogging about SUSE Manager 3.2 Beta 1 last week, this afternoon I was planning to look into what’s going on in our stable release, Manager 3.1. And I suddenly realized that we’re currently at version 3.1.4, the perfect release number for a blog on this week’s “Pi Day“.

Well, a missed opportunity for me, but that won’t stop me from telling you more about two exciting new features in 3.1.4:

New Notification UI

Let’s start with a new feature that improves the way SUSE Manager communicates with you. And no, we didn’t add a random creepy laugh. 🙂

The new notification UI

The new notification UI

We now have a new UI component in the header bar to display notifications, especially about events that otherwise may get lost in some log file. The new bell icon indicates how many new messages you have. And you can read and manage them on the new page “Home > Notification Messages“.

Initially, this will show three type of messages:

  • Salt bootstrap failures
  • Channel reposync successes
  • Channel reposync failures

 

Each message can be flagged as read or unread or deleted completely. For each failure a customized button (in line with the message) is available to react to that failure.

The type of messages will be extended to cover more information in later releases.

Configuration Management UI for Salt

This is a feature that started as a tech preview in Manager 3.1.3 and is now fully supported. It’s actually two features for the price of one:

  1. If you’ve been using the traditional configuration file management feature with its configuration channels and have been struggling with how things are different now with Salt, there is good news for you: The most commonly used part of the configuration channels feature, centrally managed configuration channels, is back for systems that are Salt Minions. And to use it you don’t need to learn anything about Salt at all!
  2. We’ve also merged the former Salt Custom States UI into the Configuration Channels. This comes with two benefits:
    • To start with, you don’t need to switch back and forth between the Configuration Channel UI for traditional clients and the Salt State Catalog feature. Salt States are now just a special flavor of configuration channels. And yes, of course we automatically migrate/import all your existing custom states to the new implementation!
    • The new implementation allows you to not just add a single Salt state file, which always was a bit limiting compared to what you can do with Salt on the command line, but you can add file resources as well, and split your Salt states into separate files that you import from the init.sls, just like you’d do it from the file system.
New Configuration State UI

New Configuration State UI

Of course the documentation has been updated to reflect this as well!

Adding a State Channel

Adding a State Channel

The plans we have for the future of this feature include

  • making it easy to import or export states from and to the file system, for example if you want to switch from managing your states via the Manager UI to using a GIT-based workflow or vice versa, and
  • combining it with the Formulas with Forms feature, so that it basically becomes and end-to-end Salt Formula UI.

 

This is Joachim Werner blogging live from the SUSE headquarters in Nuremberg, where magic is made into features. 🙂

 

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Comments

  • Avatar photo Franz says:

    Hello Joachim,

    Some weeks ago I updated to SUSE Manager 3.1.4 in my test environment.

    This version looks very promising 🙂

    Here some question to the new features:

    A) New Notification UI
    How could I delete all notifications with one click? Is there a cleaning task in the background?
    Today there are 3000 notification in the queue …
    How could I change the notification, so I get only bootstrap failures?

    B) Configuration Manangement with „state channels“
    This is also very promising, now there is a real „interface“ between SUSE Manager and SALT available.
    But for our company, this will generate a lot of work, because nowadays, we rsync from our git-server to the salt directory
    And with version 3.1.4 some interface scripts between git and suse manager are needed.
    Are there any around? Is there any documentation / examples available

    Please give me some hints to this questions …

    best regards
    Franz

  • Avatar photo Joachim Werner says:

    Hello Franz!

    This is very valuable feedback. I’ve already created enhancement requests for the features you are missing with the new notification UI.

    I’ll get back to you in private e-mail on the Salt states topic.

    By the way, as a customer you can always submit feature requests through Customer Care as well!

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