Staged Release Notes

Microsoft Azure

As you've seen in the "Deployment Tools" section above, we have added support for Azure as a hosting environment for Issuetrak. Our System Requirements article has been updated with information that specifically addresses the requirements for hosting Issuetrak in Azure, and our How to Install Issuetrak Using the Issuetrak Deployment Manager (IDM) article has been updated with steps specific to deploying in Azure.

High Availability

Issuetrak now supports being deployed in high availability environments. Our System Requirements article has been updated with information that specifically addresses the requirements for hosting Issuetrak in high availability environments. 

We're making the Issuetrak Provisioning Tool (IPT) separately available to facilitate this. 

Detached Files

We have greatly improved our support for having attachments stored in any place other than Issuetrak's web folder. You can now deploy (and re-deploy) Issuetrak in such a way that attachments are stored in a UNC or local path that is accessible from the web server.

The Issuetrak Provisioning Tool (IPT) will facilitate this, as well. 

API v2

• PATCH Endpoints - You can now use API v2 to send more efficient data updates, via PATCH endpoints. See our documentation at api.issuetrak.com, specifically the PATCH section. 
   
• Task Endpoints - These new additions for 17.6 provide the ability to pull and update Task-related information in Issuetrak.
   
• Issue Submission and Updates - Issues can now be submitted and updated via API v2.

Entity Imports

We've added the ability to import entities into your Issuetrak site, including:

• Groups
• Organizations
• Locations / Regions
• Users
• Departments

All of these entity types can be imported via a product-supplied template in CSV or XLSX formats. Simply add your data into the provided template and upload it. And to be clear: this is a method that allows you to perform the import from Issuetrak's user interface - no database manipulation shenanigans are necessary to make this work! 

OpenTelemetry Logging

Issuetrak 17.6 also comes with new telemetry-based logging facilities, built upon OpenTelemetry. If you're reading about OpenTelemetry for the first time, you will soon learn that these aren't any regular logging facilities!

Once configured, this optional feature will stream telemetry containing site performance statistics to a server of your choosing. This allows server administrators to do performance profiling on a site to monitor site health, spot potential server faults, and help track down the source of problems in their server environment. Imagine being able to create an Issuetrak-specific dashboard that tracks server response times, SQL memory utilization, IIS worker processes, and request latency statistics, as well as a myriad of other useful metrics. We've made it possible to put that together, with the addition of a few other tools.

Note that the default behavior is to still use NLog for logging, and telemetry is disabled by default, as its default configuration is effectively blanked out. See our documentation on enabling telemetry here. 

Deployment Tools

Updates to the deployment tools have changed how sites are deployed in several ways: 
 

Connection String Updates

The connection strings for each web application in Issuetrak have been updated to include two new options:

• TrustServerCertificate - This toggles whether the web server will be configured to accept the SQL server's self-signed certificate. This behavior is turned on by default. When you use the IDM to deploy a new site, you'll be prompted whether you want to use this.
   
• MultiSubnetFailover - Toggles multi subnet failover functionality, which is intended for high availability SQL server environments. This behavior is turned off by default. When you use the IDM to deploy a new site, you'll be prompted whether you want to use this.

Re-deployments of existing Issuetrak sites (including API v1 and v2 sites) will result in updates to connection strings to include the above "TrustServerCertificate" and "MultiSubnetFailover" settings set to their default values (TRUE and FALSE, respectively).

New JSON Settings

• OpenTelemetry (OTel) - IDM also provides options for configuring OpenTelemetry to send logging data to an endpoint of your choosing
   
• Azure Hosting Environment - Deployment tools will prompt for Azure Managed Identity settings, as applicable
   
• Rate Limiting - This allows you to set rate limiting parameters for your site. Using this feature requires that you install the Dynamic IP Security module for IIS.
   
• Trust Server Certificate - This determines whether the deployment tools (which necessarily run on the web server) should trust the certificate presented by the SQL server. This option defaults to TRUE. If this option is set to FALSE, the deployment tools will assume that the certificate presented by the SQL server can be validated against the certificate authority (CA) listed on the cert. If this validation fails, then the two servers won't communicate. 
   
• Multi-Subnet Failover - An option specifically for already-configured high-availability (HA) environments. Defaults to FALSE.

System Requirements

• Issuetrak supports being deployed in the Azure hosting environment.
   
• Issuetrak supports being deployed in a high availability environment.
   
• Issuetrak now supports usage of SQL Server Express! This not only lowers the barrier to hosting Issuetrak, it also provides a viable free SQL server option for Issuetrak instances that don't grow beyond 1.5GB and don't see high utilization. Check out Microsoft's SQL Server comparison page and consult with your IT team to see if SQL Server Express is a good option for your Issuetrak hosting environment.
   
• Issuetrak also no longer requires TCP/IP connections, and supports using just named pipes.
  • Please note that named pipes do not support encryption.
     
• The .NET 10 Runtime and ASP.NET Core 10 Hosting bundle (available to download directly from Microsoft here) are new server requirements for the application.
   
• .NET 6 and .NET 6 Hosting Bundle have been dropped from the System Requirements, and are no longer sufficient to run Issuetrak moving forward.
   
• Pre-17.6 sites no longer meet the app pool requirements, and will be moved to new app pools that meet the new requirements by the updated deployment tools during the upgrade.
   
• Have a look at our updated System Requirements article here.

Active Directory LDAP

Manual AD LDAP imports would fail if a user matched both an OU and group mapping for a property.

API v2

• Manual AD LDAP imports would fail if a user matched both an OU and group mapping for a property.
   
• Attempting to get information about NextActionHistory from API v2 would result in a 404 error being displayed.

Asset Management

The scheduled task for processing asset audits was unable to process large quantities (high hundreds) of assets in a day

Automation

The scheduled task for processing asset audits was unable to process large quantities (high hundreds) of assets in a day

Formatting and Special Characters

• Users with a macron in their display name would not have the macron displayed when their name appeared in user dropdown lists. Their display name would show the unicode variant of the macron instead. 
   
• A 500 error would appear when clicking the magnifying glass icon to search the "Assigned To" field when a name with a macron was populated into the field.
   
• No results would be found when searching a user field for a user with a macron in their name by typing in the field.
   
• No results would be found when searching a user field for a user with a macron in their name by clicking the magnifying glass button next to the field.
   
• When a user was assigned a task that had a macron in their name, and they attempted to edit that task, the name would revert to displaying the Unicode form of the macron.

Multifactor Authentication

Users that had MFA enabled for their accounts were unable to sign into Issuetrak after upgrading to 17.5.3.

Reporting

Running a custom report on Surveys that used "Submitted by" or "Assigned to" criteria would result in a 500 error being displayed.

Attachment Size Limits

The Core web.config file had a section removed that was necessary for changing the attachment upload size limit for Issuetrak sites. We are providing a workaround that will help with adding the missing section back in to allow you to adjust the upload size limit.