Issuetrak 17.6 is here, and we've got a lot to tell you about it!
The first thing you should know is that this release comes with a lot of dependency changes, and that means updates to our System Requirements and deployment tools. For our on-premises customers, here's a brief summary of what you need to know about these changes:
- System requirements have been updated, so make sure your hosting environment meets the requirements for 17.6 prior to upgrading
- As part of the update to our System Requirements, we now support the Azure cloud environment
- We've added the optional ability to use OpenTelemetry for application-level logging
- You can do entity imports from the user interface
- The deployment tools now include several options to simplify configuration for more nuanced environments, such as detached upload storage, high availability environments, and encrypted communications between web and SQL servers
- API v2 allows you to submit new issues, as well as issue updates
Keep reading to get the details on the changes we've made!
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 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 telemetry here.
Deployment Tools
Updates to the deployment tools have changed how sites are deployed in several ways: (all of these have yet to be further documented)
- Deployment tools will also utilize an appsettings.json to configure certain services
- The IDM now contains the "Trust Server Certificate" option, which will bypass the security validation process when presenting database-related deployment options
- Re-deployments will revise the connection strings of existing API v1 and v2 sites to include the "TrustServerCertificate" setting
- IDM also provides options for configuring OpenTelemetry to send logging data to an endpoint of your choosing
- Multi-subnet failover option in the IDM for Azure High Availability environments
- Deployment tools will detect Azure Managed Identity settings
Support for Azure Hosting Environment
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 tabs that specifically address the configuration of Azure for hosting Issuetrak, as well as multi-subnet failover for High Availability and other aspects of the environment.
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API v2
You can now send more efficient issue updates via API v2. See our documentation at api.issuetrak.com, specifically mentions of "PATCH".
System Requirements
- 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 to see if SQL Server Express is a good option for your Issuetrak hosting environment.
- 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.
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