DCImanager flagship updates is 2024 and development vector in 2025

The IT infrastructure of any contemporary enterprise is growing, evolving and becoming more complex every year. Both digitalization and high competition on the market are contributing to this. New capacities and resources are needed for qualitative implementation of new business tasks, storage and processing of increasing data – building up your own server hardware stock or leasing it. The larger the stock is, the more difficult it is to manage, keep account of and diagnose it. Besides, when building and updating the infrastructure, customers often use server and server-related solutions from various vendors, which also complicates their further maintenance and monitoring.

In developing our physical IT infrastructure management platform, we take a holistic approach and rely on the present day market demands, enhancing product functionality to meet external demands.

Here is what important changes affected DCImanager last year and what we plan to implement in the near future.

To simplify management of hardware groups through centralized setting of all parameters and monitoring their compliance, we have added the “Server profile” module.

In this case, the module allows for identical BMC settings for server groups to facilitate maintenance through BMC local user access monitoring and centralized setting of all parameters.

Refer to documentation to find out more about the feature: https://www.ispsystem.com/docs/dcimanager-admin/equipment/servers/group-operations

The ability to track changes to BMC settings within a server profile allows owners of large-scale infrastructures to monitor the compliance of settings with a corporate standard.

Platform administrators can use this feature to manage BIOS (UEFI) settings through the platform interface:

Last year we have added BIOS (UEFI) and BMC firmware into the platform library. Using the library, you can perform group flashing for servers of the same type, store required firmware versions in one location, and maintain consistent firmware versions across the whole infrastructure, particularly when new version are released.

This functionality is available only for the Infrastructure version of DCImanager.

In the future, group flashing of BIOS and BMC firmware and tracking their changes will also become part of the server profile.

We have supplemented the platform with the option to collect OS basic metrics via the operating system agent (only Linux at this point). This allows to collect and monitor information about utilization of operating system resources, such as CPU, RAM, DISK I/O, NET I/O and others, via the Grafana built-in data visualization tool.

The new module helps administrators spot bottlenecks in the system or unused resources, monitor the server history of resources utilization, diagnose server farm and plan load scaling.

In the future, OS agent information and event notifications will be available not only in Grafana, but also in the server card, while OS agent information monitoring will also be added as part of the server profile.

We have added Ubuntu Linux 24.04 OS support for server with platform. Users can now quickly install this operating system to servers directly from the template using DCImanager.

Up-to-date auth/v4 version of authorization service is now used in DCImanager.

New authorization version improves request-processing performance, enables the use of ACL and authentication limits for increased system security, ensures single entry point for authorization and user management, allows to reduce the number of containers, thus decreasing usable disk space of the platform and speeding up its commissioning and decommissioning.

This functionality provides the foundation needed to manage user sessions, lock accounts, collect login history information, and other activities.

With the new functionality, administrators have the ability to disconnect hanging sections, or reset user sections in the event of unauthorized access. Meanwhile, users have the ability to view all sections in the account and close the outdated ones.

We have added the ability to configure user blocking policies to the menu. This allows to manage security policies whenever user password guessing or unauthorized access attempt occur, including multiple unsuccessful password attempts.

We continue to develop our IT infrastructure management platform and announce functionality that will be available to DCImanager users as early as this year: