12/31/21 Release Notes

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2021 Annual Report

2021 has been our biggest year of growth since our launch in 2014. This is largely because of teams and departments—like IT Dev, DevOps, Ops, UX, User Support, Business, Customer Loyalty, and Sales and Marketing—using Germain more than ever before. As the Germain platform has grown, so has our support team, which is a key component of our success. When clients use Germain, they not only benefit from a very customizable platform, but also from ongoing help with configuration, insights, and business problems.

• 231% increase of Germain Users
  
• 284% increase of Germain units (Analyzed Data and Executed Transaction)
  
• Reminders

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Monitoring & Analytics - Error Analysis Mechanism

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Description

Identify “new & critical” errors among million. Ops teams are commonly overloaded with a high volume of errors at every level of the infrastructure. Most of the time, it is hard or impossible to quickly understand whether the errors impact the business, and it takes quite some time to find the ones that are “new”—as opposed to the ones that are “known/reoccurring.” Because of this, Ops teams frequently ignore these errors, thinking they have more critical issues to deal with. Or, on the other hand, teams may take the drastic approach of restarting their app when they get too many complaints from the business, incorrectly thinking that a restart will make these errors go away. Meanwhile end-users (including online consumers in some cases!) are impacted by these errors that pop up on their browser and may disconnect, directly affecting the business by causing poor UX, revenue loss, higher churn, etc. To help address these pains, Germain now has the ability to:

1. Identify a single “new” type of error (or crash) among millions of errors that are “known”
2. Assess an error’s business impact (user disconnection, process friction, etc). This new “error categorization” mechanism can be used to classify any type of Errors that are generated by any types of apps, i.e. desktop, web, mobile, SAAS, homegrown, packaged, etc.
3. Help understand the business impact in terms of user or process impact

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Benefit

Significantly improve UX and Process performance by finding within minutes (instead of months) critical errors that affect the business the most, and finding their root-cause, which in turns improve Customer Experience, Retention or Sales.

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Configuration

Categorization

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Monitoring & Analytics - Salesforce.com (Federation ID & User Name)

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Description

Nothing out of the ordinary, just FYI. Ability to collect User ID, User Email, Login Nameand Federation ID ‘s salesforce.com out-of-the-box fields so it is easier to analyze Salesforce.com users Other benefits that Germain provides for Salesforce.com: Monitoring & Analytics - Salesforce (09/30/21)

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Monitoring & Analytics - Tomcat (enh)

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Description

Enhanced the Tomcat Catalina log analysis provided by Germain to provide better Error analysis.

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Maintenance - Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, Zookeeper)

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Description

Configuration of Germain is now stored in Zookeeper. Changes to Docker to split up infrastructure and Germain services

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Benefit

We can now redeploy latest version of Germain to automated QA env with a single click from Jenkins. Our plan is to extend this approach to our cloud customers.

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Maintenance - Log4j Vulnerability

Germain team became aware of a widespread security vulnerability commonly known as “Log4j” (CVE-2021-44228, aka. Log4Shell). We have not identified any exposure of any client data as a result of this vulnerability, for both on-premise and cloud users of Germain. However, we do recommend Customers that use Germain onPremise to update their Germain environment as following. Similar configuration was applied to the Germain cloud instances and instances were brought back online today Monday 12/13/21 at 8:35am PST, after completion of our security review. Pass the following argument: ‐Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true to the following services:

• ActiveMQ
  Add the parameter to the ACTIVEMQ_OPTS variable (Found under activemq/bin/env):

• Backend services (action, aggregation, analytics, rtm, session tracking, storage)
  Add the parameter to each of the services startup scripts JAVA_OPTS (found under Germain Service directory /bin).
  Example:

• ElasticSearch
  ElasticSearch 7.16.1 or above: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.16/release-notes-7.16.1.html
• Solr
  Add the parameter to the SOLR_OPTS variable (Found under Solr directory bin/solr.in.sh):

• Tomcat
  Add the parameter to the CATALINA_OPTS variable for each Tomcat instance (Found under Tomcat instance dir /bin/setenv.sh):

More technical details can be found here: CVE-2021-44228 (NIST National Vulnerability Database)

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Maintenance - Other Enhancements and Bugs (12/31/21)

Below is the list of minor Enhancements and Bugs we have resolved this month. More details available upon request: support@germainux.com Note that this list does not include the configuration work, or data science help we provide to clients which is tracked on our support site: https://germainux.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/1

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