What's new in version 2022.2

December 2022

The December 2022 release significantly improves navigation through your Alloy Navigator, streamlines the automation of macOS audit, and delivers many other features we hope you will like.

Keep track of your journey with breadcrumbs

Finding your way around Alloy Navigator just got easier! A new breadcrumb trail gives you a visual indication of where you are and how you got there. Use this neat list of links to return quickly to any previous page, including where you started your journey.

Keep your recently opened records at hand

What have you been recently up to? Alloy Navigator gets you covered. Go to My Work > Recent to see all records that you have recently viewed or edited, so you can quickly find what you need. By default, records appear in chronological order, with most recently accessed ones first.

You can sort your recent records by name, class, and date and search through them using a filter box at the top.

Put your frequently used tools at your fingertips

You certainly visit some Alloy Navigator areas more often than others. Probably, you’ve never used some of them at all. To help you focus on the essentials, we implemented Favorites.

Favorites is a new sidebar section that keeps your frequently used modules easily accessible. You won't have to scour the sidebar and expand categories to find items that should be at hand. As you mark your favorite sidebar items with a cute little heart, they will appear in Favorites.

To access the Favorites section, click Favorites at the bottom of the sidebar. To go back to the full-sized sidebar, click All.

Preview what you actually need to preview

Get information faster with tailored preview flyouts. Strip unnecessary details, group the essentials at the top, add what you've been missing, and get perfect preview forms tailored to your needs.

INFO: For instructions, see Settings Help: Customizing Web App preview forms.

Organize your projects by departments, divisions, or subsidiaries

Split up your projects by departments and restrict users' access to projects based on the organizational units they belong to. Starting with this version, Projects have the Organization field, which makes them organization-related.

Focus on active relations

Relationship maps, especially complex ones, are getting more compact and speedier because the Related Objects tab now shows only active objects by default. In both map and tree modes, all relations are initially shown collapsed, displaying only the number of connected objects. You can drill down the hierarchy and unfold its levels to see the details you want.

Have a quick peek at related objects

Now you can preview related objects without opening them and getting away from your current record. Right-click a related object on the relationship map and choose Show Preview from the context menu.

The menu also offers commands for opening objects in a new tab or the current tab, depending on your profile settings.

Improved performance on large data views

For optimal performance on large data views, Alloy Navigator now limits the number of records retrieved from the database. The default limit is 1000 records in a view. Most users won't even notice such a forgiving limit because there is rarely good a reason to load that many records into a data view.

If your view exceeds the limit, there will be a warning message. Alloy Navigator will let you know that you see only a portion of data and give you an option to load all records even at the cost of a diminished performance. However, as we all already know, the best way to reduce the number of records in a view is to use the Advanced Filter.

TIP: You can increase or decrease the default limit in your personal profile settings. For instructions, see Web App Help: Customizing your personal settings.

Automate audit of your MacBooks with installable audit agent

Automate the audit of your MacBook fleet without writing any scripts. Just configure and download an audit agent installer for macOS from within Alloy Discovery. Once you install it on the computers you want audited, they will periodically audit themselves and transfer audit snapshots back to Alloy Discovery over FTP, FTPS, or SFTP. The legacy method of delivering audit snapshots over email also remains supported.

INFO: For instructions, see Alloy Discovery Help: Installing the audit agent.

Handle more admin tasks from a web browser

The web-based Admin Center introduced earlier this year is gaining traction. The set of administrative tasks you can perform in your web browser has been expanded to include these new features:

• Configure continual user synchronization from the Active Directory or other directory services

• Set up LDAP authentication using Active Directory (AD) or other directory services

• Configure and manage synchronization with Alloy Discovery for up-to-date information about every asset in your IT environment

New languages for self-service

We listened to your feedback and added localization packs for new languages and regional formats that you asked for. Now Alloy Navigator offers self-service support in eleven languages, including these new ones:

• English (United Kingdom)

• Hungarian (Hungary)

• Polish (Poland)

Immediate access to all "My Tickets" from the home page

My Tickets widget on the Self-Service Portal’s home page now gives immediate access to all tickets the current user has recently submitted, whether they are issues or service requests. Previously, this widget did not show service requests among tickets, which could have been confusing.

Updated audit tools

Alloy Audit Tools has been updated to version 2022.3. The latest version adds support for a macOS installable agent and delivers other improvements and bug fixes. For a complete list of changes, see Audit Tools Update Release Notes.

New workflow integrations

The default workflow included with this release delivers improvements and a number of valuable integrations that many sysadmins would appreciate. We are proud to note that such a new level of integration capabilities is made possible by the deep PowerShell support we added earlier this year.

Integration with Microsoft SCCM (MECM) Along with Microsoft Intune, integration with which was implemented earlier, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), recently known as Endpoint Configuration Manager (MECM), is a part of Microsoft Endpoint Manager—a single platform for managing all the endpoints in the organization. You can now integrate your SCCM/MECM into Alloy Navigator to import information about all managed computers and let the Alloy ITSM platform help you manage your IT infrastructure to the full extent. To enable the integration, use the Workflow and Business Logic > Workflow Configuration > Integrations > Microsoft SCCM parameters in the Settings App or Admin Center. INFO: For details, see Integrations: Microsoft SCCM/MECM integration.
	Integration with Microsoft Azure AD Actually, we added support for directory services other than the classic Microsoft Active Directory back in 2020, and Azure AD was among them. Now, we are adding a preconfigured, ready-to-use Azure AD integration for user data synchronization to make the admin's job easier. To enable the Azure AD integration, use the Workflow and Business Logic > Workflow Configuration > Integrations > Microsoft Azure AD parameters in the Settings App or Admin Center. INFO: For details, see Integrations: Microsoft Azure AD integration.
Device availability monitoring Keep a close eye on your company’s network with a new workflow for basic availability monitoring. The workflow engine continuously polls devices critical for the smooth operation of your organization, such as web servers, routers, or printers. Whenever any device becomes unavailable, the system immediately alerts the right people and raises an incident ticket, allowing you to act promptly to minimize downtime and reduce related costs. To turn on the monitoring, enable the two corresponding scheduled tasks under Services > Scheduled Tasks in the Settings App or Admin Center. You can also customize the parameters under Workflow and Business Logic > Workflow Configuration > Integrations > Availability Monitoring. INFO: For details, see Integrations: Availability monitoring.

NOTE: When you are upgrading from a previous version, changes to the default workflow may not apply automatically. You may be required to modify your existing workflow to get them. For assistance, submit a request to our Alloy Support Team.

Other enhancements and resolved issues

Web App

• My Favorites, the place where you keep all your favorite Alloy Navigator records at hand, has been renamed Starred. The new name is more fitting because that is where you see records flagged with a star . Besides, we needed the word Favorites for the new sidebar section.

  

• Resolved the issue with the Allocated Licenses grid on the Software tab of the Computer / Hardware form. Previously, the first column "Name" could disappear after adding a column or making other changes to the view.

• The Customize View > Advanced Filter dialog box no longer hides the Ok, Cancel, and Apply buttons when there are lots of condition rules added.

• Alloy web apps have been updated to use the most recent stable versions of JavaScript frameworks and internal components.

Self-Service Portal

• Resolved the issue with missing localizations in some areas of wizard-style action forms.

• Addressed the issue with scrolling through lengthy Knowledge Base articles using Google Chrome.

API

• The API has been expanded with support for attachments. Now that our REST API can handle files, we'll be adding attachments to our mobile applications later this year. For now, you can take immediate advantage of this addition by making your 3rd party integrations more robust.

  INFO: For details, see API User's Guide: Working with attachments.

Settings app for administrators

• Setting up Alloy Discovery Synchronization has become more convenient. The SQL Server name is now being detected automatically from the provided connection information, so the administrator no longer needs to enter it by hand.

• Added the ability to copy Scheduled Tasks.

Import wizard

• The Import wizard now correctly populates the Notes field for all objects. Previously, Notes values could be imported only for Service Support tickets.

Active Directory sync

• Resolved issues with pulling the pwdLastSet attribute from the Active Directory.

Desktop App

• Addressed the issue with short (containing only one or two input fields) action forms not remembering their position between runs.

• Addressed the issue with an empty value that could appear in the Category drop-down list when creating recurrent tickets.

Discovery and audit

• Good news for fans of the "email audit" method in Alloy Discovery! Although we believe that most of our customers have already abandoned that legacy method in favor of FTP delivery, this release adds support for the OAuth 2.0-based modern authentication to the delivery of snapshots over email, the last place that lacked it. Just in time, as far as Microsoft started turning off Basic authentication in Exchange Online for all tenants this fall.

  INFO: For instructions, see Alloy Discovery Help: Configuring Email Audit Sources.

• Get a clear picture of audit processing with the improved approach for calculating the progress of tasks in the Task Progress window.

• Two new logs—Backlogged Snapshots and Backlog History—help you get a better control over the situations when there are so many audit snapshots coming to the queue that the server can’t process them on time and older pending snapshots get replaced with newer snapshots from same devices while waiting to be processed.

• Queued snapshots now receive a "Queued" status instead of "Succeeded". This change along with the new "Backlogged" status makes it easier to trace the fate of each audit snapshot on its journey to the Alloy Discovery database.