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October 23

We are pleased to present our latest offering of pi - our October 2023 product release! This page helps summarise the areas of the dashboard we have Added, Changed, or Fixed meaning you can make a quick and informed decision on when to upgrade to the latest release.

Here is what is included in the release.

Product Release

Added

The ‘Drill to top on full screen close’ option (introduced in our September 23 release) now supports the ‘Drill to Chart’ option.

Now, once this option or the related ‘Full screen to display this level’ are set to True that drill level and any below it will reflect that behaviour - even if you have drilled to another chart.

The two fields are now independent of one another. When editing a chart, you will be able to tell when a drill level has one/both settings overridden by a higher drill level as they will be disabled, appear as checked, and a warning icon with a helpful, on-hover tooltip will be displayed next to them.

Open

It is now possible to set a Start and End drill level that a user can see when viewing a chart - when embedded.

As an example, where a chart has 5 drill levels, it would be possible to have some users that can see levels 2-4. When skipping the top levels, no filter will be applied to the chart that is seen by the user.

You can set the values for drillStart and drillEnd as query parameters on the URL that you are using to embed.

When setting a drillStart you will also need to supply the identifiers for the chart and hierarchy levels of the drill levels above the start, and the drill level you wish the user to see by manipulating the URL directly.

These must be separated by the !$! delimiter when adding multiple levels. When drilling to the top, the user will return the level defined as the drillStart parameter. It is possible to use the parameters individually or together.

The parameters are 0 indexed - with the first hierarchy in the chart corresponding to drill level 0.

The functionality will also work for dynamic drill conditions.

Further documentation on restricting drill levels when embedding charts can be found on our Embedding pages.

Tomcat logs can now be set up to automatically be removed after a certain number of days. This behaviour is administered by a new setting that can be defined within;

• Under the Tomcat tab of the Configuration-Tool GUI under a new ‘Logging’ section (see picture below)

• Under the Tomcat > Logging section of the dashboard.json file

• Set via the PI_TOMCAT_LOGGING_MAX_AGE environment variable

This new setting also dictates the turnover of a new, daily rotating log file name out.{date}.log.

This new file is where log messages from the Dashboard are written. The default value for this setting is 0 which means that no logs will be removed.

To enhance our scaling capabilities, we now have support for using Redis to store session data. This allows you to run multiple Dashboard instances in a load balanced environment with a single, fast store of session data. The configuration for this is done via environment variables or in the configuration tool, and you can choose no session sync, tcp session sync which uses Tomcat’s built in sync or Redis where the session storage is fully offloaded to Redis.

This is configured via the configuration tool (Windows, Linux) or environment variables (containers).

For environment variable usage the following variables are required:

• PI_TOMCAT_ENABLE_SESSION_SYNC: "true"

• PI_TOMCAT_SESSION_SYNC_MODE: redis

• PI_TOMCAT_SESSION_SYNC_REDIS_HOST: REDIS_HOST

• PI_TOMCAT_SESSION_SYNC_REDIS_PORT: 6379

• PI_TOMCAT_SESSION_SYNC_REDIS_PASSWORD: REDIS_PASSWORD

Error handling for the scheduler service has been improved to better direct you to issues when a schedule is not sending correctly. The scheduler will now correctly inform you of the following issues:

• Attached chart having an issue with a data connection.​

• Attached chart having a SQL error.​

• User doesn't have permission to view an attached chart.​

• Failure associated with saving attachments to a directory.​

• "Other" chart specific errors.

Changed

To resolve reported vulnerabilities in the base used for our container images, all supported images have been either updated or rebased to resolve these issues. As a result of using more lightweight base images over 150 MiB has been saved from the images.

The Athena JDBC driver (provided by Amazon) has been updated to address reported vulnerabilities.

JDom, AWS Marketplace and Java SAML libraries have been upgraded to remain updated with the latest features, and to address reported vulnerabilities.

Fixed

The Category panel unpin label/description was incorrectly worded, which has been rectified as per the image below.

When embedding 2 categories within 1 html page, with 2 different category modes, the category modes would conflict and result in inconsistent behaviour. The result being that sometimes it would incorrectly use the same category mode for both embedded categories.

When running the dashboard on Windows, the Scheduler was unable to pick up and use the correct time zone. This meant that the times in the monitoring screen were incorrect, and the scheduler logs would fill up with errors.

An incorrect encoding format was being applied to the URL feedback snack bar, when using single-chart mode. The resolution helps improving both the security and user display experiences.