What's New in SquaredUp DS Standalone

What's New in v6.3

SquaredUp DS Standalone v6.3 includes the following new features:

New Markdown tile
Tear-off tiles

New Markdown tile

A new Markdown tile has been added which allows you to add richer content to your dashboards such as links, lists, images and more! You can add Markdown tiles to any dashboard or perspective.

The tile supports "basic" Markdown syntax, see the Markdown guide for reference.

Select the Markdown icon to start configuring the tile.[Image]To configure the tile, simply enter or paste your markdown into the markdown field. For examples see Markdown tile.

You can now click the new Copy an Open Access URL button for an individual tile (that has open access enabled) and then render that tile in the browser when the URL is visited. The URL can also be pasted into the URL field of the Edit embed tile window to render that tile elsewhere in the application.

Additionally, this feature allows URLs for individual tiles to be copied and pasted into iframe tiles or similar in SquaredUp Cloud or some other custom intranet application.

Limitations for this feature are as follows:

Tiles accessed by a URL will not work if open access is disabled on the parent dashboard. They will start working again if it is re-enabled.
Tiles URLs will no longer be valid if the tile on the parent dashboard is modified - a new URL needs to be copied in this case.
Tiles do not update themselves in the background.
Pinned Perspectives in open access mode do not support this feature.

Download now & more information

To get started see How to install SquaredUp DS Standalone using the installer

Get the latest version of SquaredUp DS Standalone

Read the Release Notes for SquaredUp DS Standalone for details on other improvements in this release.

If you have an earlier version of DS Standalone already installed, then the installer will upgrade your installation, see How to upgrade SquaredUp DS Standalone

What's New in v6.2

SquaredUp DS Standalone v6.2 includes the following new features:

Tile fullscreen mode
Ability to rename providers

Tile fullscreen mode

You can now view tiles in fullscreen mode by clicking the new Full-screen view button, which is displayed when hovering on a tile.

Clicking this button opens a copy of the tile in a larger window, providing you with a clearer sized view of an otherwise small tile area.

As fullscreen mode displays a copy of the tile, settings such as sorted headers do not persist when opening or closing the view.

To exit fullscreen mode, do one of the following:

Click the Close button in the top-right of the window.
Press the ESC key
Press the TAB + ENTER keys.

Export tile data

Additionally, a new Export to Excel button has been added to the top-right of the fullscreen mode window for supported tiles. Click this button to export the data for the expanded tile to a Microsoft Excel document.

Rename providers

Providers contain the connection details to external platforms and are maintained in ☰ > system > Integrations.

Previously, if you wanted to rename a provider it had to be deleted and then a new one had to be created with a new name.

Now, you can rename a provider by simply selecting it on the Integrations page and editing the name field.

What's New in v6.1

SquaredUp DS Standalone v6.1 includes the following new features:

24-hour time format option
Trend lines in time-series graphs
EAM-X alert description improvements
Undo/redo for draft dashboard editing
Performance drill-down page improvements
Many more improvements

24 hour time format option

Previously, times were only displayed using a 12 hour clock format (for example, 9AM, 12PM, 1PM etc.). Now, you can choose to display times across the application in a 24 hour format (for example, 9:00, 21:00, 13:00 etc.), giving you greater flexibility in how you present your data.

Trend lines in time-series graphs

You now have the ability to display trend lines in time-series graphs across the application, enhancing your ability to analyze changes across your data. This feature can be toggled at tile-level on the display panel in the tile's configuration settings.

EAM-X alert description improvements

Alert descriptions have been improved to give the customer more context on what has gone wrong, without always needing to drill into SquaredUp DS Standalone cloud to see more (for example, alerts can now pass through the actual error messages and information on breached thresholds).

Undo / redo option when editing dashboard drafts

Undo / Redo buttons have been added to the dashboard edit view. Whenever you make a change, you can now use these buttons to step back and forward through the changes you make.

Performance drill-down page improvements

The Performance tile drill down view also benefits from the enhancements brought by the addition of Trend lines in time-series graphs. If enabled at the tile-level, trend lines are shown on the drill down. Trend lines can now also be toggled locally from within the drill down via the new Trends option in the Settings panel, however this option is not persisted when leaving the drill down view.

Similarly, you can now also select to display horizontal lines across your graphs to now the maximum, minimum, and average values for that data. These lines can be toggled via the new max, min and avg options.

New Data Rangeoptions have also been added to the Settings panel of the drill down, which let you refine the y axis of the graph for each drill down session. As with the newTrends option, this setting is local to the drill down view and is not persistent.

Additionally, where previously selecting the CUSTOM time-series option would display the custom time field under the ribbon and push the graph down, this field now appears adjacent to the CUSTOMoption when selected so that the graph is not disturbed.

Auditing improvements

The auditing feature has been enhanced with the following features that improve the user experience:

You now have the ability to filter folders.
You can now filter on multiple types of event at the same time (for example, Dashboard moved + Team Folders modified).
Previously, you had to scope via the filter pane before any results displayed. Now, auditing events from the last 24 hours now loaded by default.

Scalar tile text alignment

An Alignment option has been added to the Scalar tile settings, allowing you to select whether you want the scalar text to be left-aligned, centered or right-aligned.

Number formatting options

Previously, only the "Si units" number format was supported. Now, decimal number format support has been added for small units and separator format support has been added for large units.

This enhancement allows you to present metrics very common to infrastructure monitoring in a familiar format. For example, without the separation feature for large numbers a disk space value of 74200mb was displayed as 7.42k - which made little sense to an infrastructure engineer.

VADA: performance improvements in Analyze mode
Initial page size / speed load improvements

See

What's New in v6.0

SquaredUp DS Standalone v6.0 includes the following new features:

Date Heatmap: add aggregation options for Web API, SQL and PowerShell tiles
SquaredUp Cloud aligned color pallet and styling
New Column Graph visualization: Time series data as bar graphs

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS Standalone

What's New in v5.9

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.9 includes the following new features:

New visualization: Date heatmap
New visualization mode: Vertical bars
Tile copy/paste functionality
Dashboard favorites
Home dashboard
Personal dashboards for all users
Many more enhancements

New visualization: Date Heatmap

The date heatmap lets you see events in a calendar view, so you can easily spot patterns in events. The visualization is available for SQL, PowerShell and Web API tiles.

New visualization mode: Vertical bars

The bar chart available in previous versions now has an additional feature to enable it to display its data vertically (rather than horizontally as with previous versions). It is also possible to modify the width of the bars in both horizontal and vertical modes.

Tile copy/paste functionality

It is now possible to copy and paste a tile both within the same dashboard or between dashboards using new tile copy/paste buttons and your browser clipboard functionality. This will help speed up dashboard authoring and allow users to create their own dashboards by reusing components from existing ones.

Dashboard favorites

Any dashboard can now be added to a personal favorites menu to make it easier for an end user to access their most used dashboards. This will be vital in busy SquaredUp DS deployments. This functionality is available for all SquaredUp DS users, regardless of permissions levels.

Home dashboard

Users now have the ability to set their own “home” dashboard, making it easier to access, and so their chosen dashboard is the first thing shown when the user logs in. This functionality is available for all SquaredUp DS users, regardless of permissions levels.

Personal dashboards for all users

Historically only users with the “author” permission over a folder had the ability to create dashboards of any sort. Users of all other permissions levels could only view dashboards created by others. In this release we have added the ability for all users to create personal dashboards, that is dashboards a user creates which are stored for their personal use only (so cannot be published). This is great for enabling read-only users to be able to troubleshoot technical issues using SCOM data without needing elevated SCOM permissions.

Many more enhancements

Cleaner list of tiles with better categorization of tiles
“The X Tile” provides help in connecting SquaredUp DS to SquaredUp Cloud for quicker setup
Donut tile labeling improvements – new inline legend and sizing options

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS Standalone

What's New in v5.8

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.8 includes the following new features:

Conditional custom colors on more tiles

Highlight the most important objects on a dashboard visualization based on its value (e.g. show C: drives with less than 20% free space in red on bar graphs). Works across many tiles and visualizations including lines, sparklines, bars and donuts. Use the new mustache control to set one or more thresholds and choose a specific color per threshold to highlight what’s more important to you and your audience on a dashboard.

More enhancements

Option to show data points on line graph

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS Standalone

What's New in v5.7

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.7 includes the following new features:

Timeframes – major enhancements
Line Graph tile – major enhancements
Recycle Bin
Many more enhancements

Timeframes – Major Enhancements

A much-requested set of improvements bring new control over the dashboard and tile timeframes. Choose a very specific date/time range on a Line Graph tile, or perform some analysis by looking at various time ranges. These are some of the use cases that the timeframe improvements now enable. Specifically:

- A greater range of dashboard timeframes with the ability to specify ISO 8601 timeframes e.g. last x minutes/hours/days/months

- User-friendly date/time picker in Connect tiles to inherit dashboard timeframes e.g. to insert in a Web API header, or within a PowerShell or SQL script.

See Timeframes for tiles

Line Graph tile – Major Enhancements

Several improvements aim to strengthen the capabilities of Line Graphs. Display a threshold line and a red area of concern to quickly spot out-of-bound metrics. The x-axis now draws future dates as well as up to the last datetime point.

For example How to use the Elasticsearch tile

Recycle Bin

Any deleted dashboards now end up in the new Recycle Bin. An administrator can see who deleted dashboards and when, then take action: restore or permanently delete.

See Recycle Bin

Many more enhancements

Sparkline color matching
Each user's last login time on the Named User list
Improvements to Alert tile date columns
Donut legend is optionally scrollable to fix tile height
and more...

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS Standalone

What's New in v5.6

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.6 includes the following new features:

Option to limit the number of objects returned (Top n) in the Status tile
Option to wrap sub-label in the Status tile
Allow API query parameters to be set at provider level

See Release Notes for SquaredUp DS Standalone

What's New in v5.5

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.5 includes the following new features:

Adjustable dashboard refresh interval
Many more enhancements

Adjustable dashboard refresh interval

A new dashboard setting lets you set the refresh interval for a given dashboard and its Open Access version. Whether you need to reduce the load on your external data, or an API comes with an access cost, you can increase the refresh interval in increments, up to 6 hours. You can also decrease the interval down to 30 seconds on any given dashboard if you need to see the data more often.

See How to create a dashboard - Dashboard Settings

Many more enhancements

Switch visualizations whilst retaining some tile configuration
Format value on a Bar Graph tile with the mustache formatter
Set Open Access theme to light or dark mode per dashboard see Dark and Light Theme Setting
Disable interaction in Open Access per dashboard see Interaction Setting
WAP Support (ADFS Single Sign-On) see How to configure SquaredUp to use an application proxy
And much more, see Release Notes for SquaredUp DS Standalone

What's New in v5.4

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.4 includes the following new features:

New data source: ODBC
Updated Grid tile: major enhancements

New data source: ODBC

The new ODBC data source lets you instantly visualize any data from virtually any database. From Oracle, PostGre, MySQL to many more, you can now dashboard your most important metrics directly from your ODBC databases using a dynamic SQL query.

See How to use the SQL tile

Updated Grid tile: major enhancements

Unlock your grid tiles! Breeze through your logs and alerts with the ability to sort, search and filter. Optimise the look of your dashboard tables for any screens by setting the zoom/font size, column width and improved text wrap. Available for any Grid tiles.

For example see How to use the Web API tile

What's New in v5.3

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.3 includes the following new features:

Community Dashboards: Sharing and Importing
New visualization: Status Image
Default dashboard timeframe
Scalar: conditional colors
Donut: display improvements

The Community Dashboards website has been completely redesigned to include any dashboard submitted by our community. Check out some of our most popular dashboards (VMWare, Kubernetes, and more) and import them directly in your own instance of SquaredUp DS Standalone.

Be a community hero! Export your own dashboards to our community using the new one-click export.

See Dashboard Packs

New visualization: Status Image

Visualize the status of what’s important to you, pinpoint a problem more quickly and accurately, and share your complex metrics into simple and compelling dashboards for your stakeholders. Thanks to the new Status Image visualization, you can overlay status icons from any external data sources on top of any images of your choice (e.g. a world map, a data center layout, a picture from your diagramming tool like Visio). Statuses can be retrieved and calculated from any data sources (Web API, PowerShell script, Splunk, Elasticsearch, etc) thanks to our intuitive tile designer.

Default dashboard timeframe

Set the default timeframe of your dashboard so that you and anyone you have shared the dashboard with Open Access can always see the dashboard in its most relevant light depending on its purpose and target audience. Set it to 30 days or longer for an application SLA dashboard shared with your stakeholders, or 1 hour for your root cause analysis dashboard. Timeframes range from 1 hour to 12 months.

See Timeframes for tiles

Scalar: conditional colors

Add impact to your key metrics with conditional colors for scalar visualizations. Available for any metrics or data point from your external data sources. Use the intuitive logic builder to create custom conditions that will trigger your scalar visualization to change color. Choose from a range of colors with the option to highlight the background or the text. Also added support for web links so you can drill out to the corresponding tool to see more details about your metric.

Donut: display improvements

Include the ability to map a specific color to a specific segment/legend of the donut, show as percentage and sorting by value or legend. Note: Status tiles only support sorting, Alert and ServiceNow tiles only support percentage.

What's New in v5.2

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.2 includes the following new features:

PowerShell tile enhancements
New visualizations for Splunk
Public GitHub Samples repository
Various security improvements

PowerShell enhancements

The hugely popular PowerShell visualization tiles have been enhanced in this release to provide script execution controls and security configuration:

• Create your own Run As accounts for improved security.

• Configure script execution interval to independently control the load on your external data sources.

• All visualization scripts now run inside their own child process for increased robustness, with the ability to choose the execution environment (.NET Framework or .NET Core) for each script independently depending on the version of PowerShell your script is written.

See How to use the PowerShell tile

New Splunk visualizations

The Splunk tile now includes a full range of visualizations: Bar Graph, Donut, Line Graph, Scalar, Sparklines, Grid, Status Icons and Blocks.

See How to use the Splunk tile

GitHub Samples

A new public GitHub repository has been published, that contains sample dashboards and scripts, is now available and accessible from within the SquaredUp DS application. The GitHub repository is opened to contributions from the community. Browse the repository for dashboard ideas and various scripts to help you make the most of SquaredUp DS. From SolarWinds and Log Analytics dashboards to purpose-built SQL and PowerShell scripts, be sure to take a look at the growing list of samples and contribute your own creations!

See GitHub Samples repository

Security Improvements

A number of security improvements have been made in this release, following our regular independent security review and penetration test. Best practices for secure deployment of SquaredUp DS have been updated.

See Best Practices for Security.

What's New in v5.1

SquaredUp DS Standalone v5.1 includes the following new features:

New visualizations available for the Elasticsearch, PowerShell, and SQL tiles
SquaredUp DS Standalone Enterprise edition

New visualizations available for the Elasticsearch, PowerShell and SQL tiles

The Elasticsearch, PowerShell, and SQL tiles now include the full suite of visualizations: bar graph, donut, grid, line graph, scalar, sparklines and status.

See How to use the Elasticsearch tile, How to use the PowerShell tile and How to use the SQL tile.

SquaredUp DS Standalone Enterprise edition

SquaredUp DS Standalone is free forever for up to 3 users. And we have just introduced the Enterprise edition for companies who need the flexibility to scale up their SquaredUp DS Standalone usage. The Enterprise edition includes the following features:

Purchase 10 or more users: dashboards for all your teams anywhere in your organization
Team Folders: manage access to your dashboards and delegate control to specific groups of users inside and outside your organization so the right people see the right data. See Team Folders
High availability: enable load balancing between servers or create two or more different access points into SquaredUp DS with different modes of authentication. See Enabling High Availability
Enterprise integrations:
- Splunk (How to use the Splunk tile)
- ServiceNow (How to use the ServiceNow tile)
- Azure App Insights (How to use the Azure Application Insights tile)
Dev/Test license
Onboarding & Technical Support: Setup assistance and training to get you up and running fast, and exceptional support that won’t let you down

See Licensing Overview, visit our website or contact our sales team for more information.

Web API - Pull data from external web sources and display data from any API (How to use the Web API tile)
SQL - Visualize data from SQL databases using standard queries (How to use the SQL tile)
PowerShell – endlessly extend with metrics from any source using PowerShell (How to use the PowerShell tile)

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