What’s New in Stratusphere UX 5.8.6

On the heels of release 5.8.5, we are thrilled to share version 5.8.6 of Stratusphere UX. And while much of this release focuses on behind-the-scenes enhancements and routine virtual appliance patches, we have introduced a couple of key features I wanted to highlight. Whats-NewSpecifically, I wanted to share some detail on the newly organized and enhanced Advanced Mode Dashboards, as well as some goodness from our friends at NVIDIA.

Advanced Mode Dashboards

We introduced dashboards a little while back, but have made great strides on usability. Specifically, the newly organized Advanced Mode Dashboards enhance the depth of visibility in Stratusphere—they provide a front-end and overview of key metrics and user experience indicators. The dashboards were designed to lower the barrier of entry and create an easier visibility interface in support of user workload monitoring and diagnostic activities.

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Stratusphere UX Advanced Mode Dashboards help provide the means to:

  • Find a user, machine or machine group, view and compare details over a given time frame
  • Create a stepping-off point, from which you can easily drill in and diagnose via the Advanced Inspectors
  • Identify trends and gain visibility into the top 1,000 consumers within an environment

Stratusphere UX and the Advanced Mode Dashboards are designed to save organizations time and money while boosting productivity. Advanced Mode Dashboards allow administrators to proactively monitor environments and visually correlate trends in those areas of the architecture and platform infrastructure—those areas that have the greatest impact on user experience.

NVIDIA GPU Metrics

This release also marks the introduction of deeper metrics to support GPU use cases. Back at VMworld 2016, NVIDIA announced GRID 2.0, a new hardware and software platform that offers additional GPU resources and capabilities. As a part of this new GRID software release, NVIDIA provided back-stage access via an API to Liquidware Labs, which gave us the ability to pull deeper and richer metrics into Stratusphere UX.

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Enhanced GPU visibility included in Stratusphere UX 5.8.6 now includes detail such as GPU encode, GPU decode and Frame Buffer. These metrics are per virtual GPU (vGPU) and will provide detail and metrics to support a number of use cases.

But Wait, There’s More

In addition to GPU and the enhanced Advanced Mode Dashboards, this release of Stratusphere UX also includes increased security access to the Stratusphere APIs. User ID and password-based security is now the default behavior for Stratusphere API access. In addition, the new security features allow whitelist and blacklist access control capabilities. The previous IP-based security model will be phased out and a newer certificate-based security model is in the works.

This release continues the trend of lowering the barrier of entry for the monitoring, diagnostics, and optimization of end user computing environments. We appreciate the challenges faced by all of you; and we continue to do our part to expose the metrics and detail necessary to deliver the optimal end user experience. Please let us know how we’re doing. Give us a shout—we’d really love to hear from you.