October 2023 Product Updates

At Harness, we have been hard at work so you can delight your customers without facing software delivery toil. Here is what has been changing in the previous month across Harness Products.

Continuous Delivery & GitOps

1. Harness Aida Feedback: You can now provide detailed feedback in the Harness AIDA chat in CD.
2. Step Group Variables: There was no way in Pipeline Studio to add step group variables when creating a step group template. This section has now been added.
3. UI improvements - Approval step feedback: This release improves the UI feedback when executing an Approval step. Previously, the pipeline execution log console could appear stuck at the Approval step even after the pipeline processed the step successfully. This release includes a back-end optimization to ensure that the Pipeline Execution UI processes and displays log messages for Approval steps in real time.
4. Tanzu Command Step: Tanzu command step in Tanzu native deployment now supports input and output variables which helps users to define input variables which can be consumed in the script and script output is available as part of the step to be consumed in other steps.
5. Regex filter support for Artifact Source Artifactory paths: Artifactory artifacts supports additional configuration of Artifact filters , where regex for the complete path including nested folders can be provided and filtered.
6. Service Propagation for Multi-Service: CD Stages with multiple services now supports service propagation across stages.

Full Continuous Delivery & GitOps Release Notes

Continuous Integration

1. New S3 step Support: You can now use the Upload Artifacts to S3 step with buckets with disabled ACLs.
2. New AIDA error analysis support: When Troubleshooting with AIDA, stage-level error analysis is available for failed stages without steps. If a stage has steps, step-level error analysis occurs instead. The Harness AI Development Assistant (AIDA™️) for CI is a beta feature that is behind the feature flag CI_AI_ENHANCED_REMEDIATIONS.
3. New Test Intelligence Support: Test Intelligence now supports manual branch builds (the Git Branch build type). This is in addition to existing support for manual PR builds, as well as PR and push webhook triggers. When you enable Test Intelligence, you can use a manual branch build to Generate the initial call graph, and for subsequent pipeline runs.
4. UI Updates - Test Intelligence: When you enable Test Intelligence for Scala or Kotlin, the Packages and Test Annotations fields are now available in the Visual editor.

Full Continuous Integration Release Notes

Cloud Cost Management

1. Perspective Support update: Display refunds or discounts on the graph within perspectives. Previously, our graph in perspectives didn't display refunds or discounts, resulting in empty spots when values were negative. This enhancement improves this by aggregating negative values into a red-colored bar chart. You can now toggle a button in General Preferences to view these previously hidden negative costs.
2. Support added for copying Cost Category buckets: Implemented a new feature that enables users to copy cost buckets from one cost category to multiple cost categories simultaneously. You have the flexibility to choose any number of buckets for copying. Upon selection, a popup prompt appears, allowing you to specify the target cost categories for copying the selected buckets. Upon successful completion, you receive a success notification along with relevant details.
3. Updated support for additional fields for ticket creation: Previously, CCM displayed only the essential Jira or ServiceNow fields in Recommendation Workflows. However, with this enhancement, CCM introduces a new field + Fields that allows users to add optional fields as needed.

Full Cloud Cost Management Release Notes

Service Reliability Management

1. Composite SLO Support Added: SRM dashboards now include comprehensive data for composite Service Level Objectives (composite SLOs). This enhancement gives you a holistic view of both simple and composite SLO performance.
2. Additional filter Support: Added new filters named Environment-Based and SLO Type to the SLO listing page. You can now filter the SLO list on environment or SLO type for improved management.
3. UI Update: The Service Health tab on the monitored service details page has been renamed to Change Impact.
   

Full Service Reliability Management Release Notes

Chaos Engineering

1. Chaos Faults Support Added: Added support for HTTPs protocol in API Chaos Faults.
2. Chaos Faults Targeting Update: Added support for targeting specific ports when using API Chaos Faults via a new tunable, for example, DESTINATION_PORTS.

Full Chaos Engineering Release Notes

Internal Developer Portal (IDP)

1. Scorecards: IDP has now Scorecards available for everyone. It contains several data sources and data points within the framework. There are default checks for you to use. You can create custom checks as well. Watch this tutorial video to know more.
2. New Plugins Support: IDP module now supports more plugins from the Backstage Marketplace. The two recently supported plugins are, Grafana and SonarQube.

Full Internal Developer Portal Notes

Software Engineering Insights

1. Widget UI update: Enhanced the user experience in widget management. Now commonly used widgets are placed under the “Frequently Used” tab for quick access and relatively lesser used widgets are placed under the "Advanced" tab. 
2. Jira support for Deployment Frequency: Deployment frequency calculation now includes Jira releases. Users can configure this feature under the WORK PROFILE in the widget settings.
3. New Trend Report Capability: Added the capability to display the total number of tests/test cases for the Trend Report in TestRail. The trend report now provides cumulative counts of tests and test cases.
4. New Support for Microsoft AD FS: Added support for Microsoft AD FS (Active Directory Federation Service) authentication to the Jira integration using the satellite.

Continuous Error Tracking

1. Added additional Event Filtering Support: Event filtering has been enhanced by removing event type selector boxes and displaying event counts above the events list. Additionally, a multi-select dropdown for event types has been introduced for improved usability.
2. Updated Audit Trail Support: CET now provides an audit trail feature for Agent Tokens and Critical Event definitions. You can view the audit trail for create, update, and delete operations, enhancing visibility and security in token management.
3. ARC Screen UI Update: On the ARC screen, variables now display their values on hover. Additionally, when you select a variable, it is highlighted in the variables panel for easy identification.

Full Continuous Error Tracking Release Notes

Platform

Here are some important improvements to our platform that should enhance your user experience:

1. Delegate Expiration Update: The delegate expiration policy has been extended from 3 months to 6 months. You now only have to update delegates once every 6 months. This item requires Harness Delegate version 23.09.80505.
2. Delegate Helm Chart Update: The delegate Helm chart is now included in the delegate proxy configuration. You can pull the Helm chart from https://<YOUR_LOADBALANCER_URL>/storage/harness-download/delegate-helm-chart/.
3. Heartbeat Interval Update: The heartbeat interval that perpetual tasks use to test connectors has been increased from 10 minutes to 30 minutes. This change aims to reduce the number of errors logged due to failed heartbeats.
4. ACL Cleanup Optimization: Access control lists (ACLs) have now been optimized by the removal of ACLs that are no longer necessary and by ensuring that redundant ACLs are no longer created for new role assignments.
5. LDAP Interval Update: The default interval for synchronizing LDAP groups has been increased from 15 minutes to 1 hour. This value is customizable, so you can set it to a value of your choice. This change does not affect existing LDAP configurations.
6. UI Enhancement for Roles: The Roles page now supports a list view in addition to the existing card view. In addition to the information shown in the card view, the list view shows you which resources are selected for the role.
7. Authentication settings UI Update: The Session Timeout field in Authentication Settings is renamed to Session Inactivity Timeout. The field now automatically converts the minutes you enter to higher units of time, and displays the result under the field to simplify usage. For example, if you enter 1440, the UI shows 1 day below the field.

Full Platform Release Notes

Self-Managed Enterprise Edition

1. Platform: Harness Self-Managed Enterprise Edition now supports self-managed MinIO object storage for disaster recovery.
2. Azure API Support Update: A new getAzureKeyVaultClient API is available to fetch the list of Azure vaults.
3. Harness Configuration Update: You can now apply Harness' recommended high performance configuration to reach a scale of 1000 concurrent pipelines.
4. Redis Database Support Update: You can now use your Redis password in your external self-managed Redis database.
5. Delegate Log update: Delegate selection logs now include the DelegateId, DelegateName, and hostname. This item is available with Harness Platform version 80022 and does not require a new delegate version.
6. Delegate Maintenance Update: The delegate expiration policy has been extended from 3 months to 6 months. You now only need to update delegates once every 6 months.
7. Pipeline Looping Strategy Update: The pipeline now retrieves the current status of the looping strategy for stages and steps during execution. New built-in Harness expressions provide the current execution status of the looping strategy for nodes (stages/steps) using a matrix or repeat strategy.
8. Nested pipeline Update: Harness has introduced restrictions on the depth of nesting in execution pipelines to enhance system stability. Now, a node execution will not be allowed if it exceeds 25 levels of nesting. The 25th level refers to the node being the 25th child starting from the root node pipeline.
9. Continuous Integration: To support CI pipelines, Harness added the ability to set the Harness Delegate environment variable LOG_STREAMING _URL by default. If the delegate is outside of the cluster, the fallback log service URL is LOG_SERVICE_ENDPOINT from CI. This update also includes a new TI_SERVICE_URL delegate environment variable that takes the ti-service URL input from the delegate.
10. Updated Datadog Support [SRM]: In manual Query mode, the Datadog Metrics Health source now provides support for formulas.
11. Updated Splunk Support [SRM]: The Splunk connector has been enhanced to include support for Bearer Token.
12. Updated API Support [SRM]: Error messages from health source providers are now included in API responses for improved user experience and debugging efficiency.

Full Self-Managed Enterprise Release Notes

Early Access

Continuous Delivery

1. Post Prod Rollback Support: Added support for Post Prod Rollback for Native Helm deployment types and ASG Deployment types. For these Services, a Rollback to the previous version can be triggered from the Services Dashboard. For more information, go to Rollback Deployments. This feature is behind the Feature Flag POST_PROD_ROLLBACK.
2. New Service Dashboard support: The Services Dashboard includes new support for Helm Chart deployments.

Continuous Integration

1. Enable and configure Cache Intelligence in the Visual editor: The Cache Intelligence visual editor fields are behind the feature flag CI_CACHE_INTELLIGENCE. Contact Harness Support to enable the feature.You can enable and configure Cache Intelligence in the Pipeline Studio's Visual editor. Previously, you could only enable Cache Intelligence through the YAML editor. For more information, go to the Cache Intelligence documentation. This enhancement only applies to the Harness Cloud build infrastructure.

Security Testing Orchestration

1. Exemptions UI Update: You can click on a row in the Exemptions table to view details for the issue associated with that exemption. For best results in STO, you should specify a baseline for every target. To encourage this, the Exemption Details pane hides details for an issue if there is no baseline detected. To specify the baseline, select Set in Targets.These enhancements are behind the Feature Flag STO_EXEMPTION_DETAILS.

Chaos Engineering

1. Chaos Guard: Added support for evaluation of multiple app labels when running experiments with multiple target app labels. This feature is currently behind a feature flag named CHAOS_SECURITY_GOVERNANCE.
2. ‍Resilience Probes: Enhanced mode selection drawer to show the UI according to selected mode by the users. Previously it was showing the image indicating SOT for all modes irrespective of the selected mode. This feature is currently behind a feature flag named CHAOS_PROBES_ENABLED.

Software Engineering Insights (SEI)

1. RBAC Support added: RBAC support is added for dashboard and organizational unit (OU) level.
2. OU Admin Role Enhancement: The OU admin role has been extended with new capabilities. OU admins can still map workspaces and OUs and modify their definitions as before. Additionally, they can now view dashboards associated with the OUs they are assigned to.
3. Public Dashboard User Role: Admins can associate workspaces and Org Units with public dashboard users, allowing them to view only the dashboards associated with them. This feature is currently behind the Feature Flag / Entitlement ORG_UNIT_ENHANCEMENTS.
4. New Interval Support: Added the support for four additional intervals in Trellis and Raw Stats - Last Week, Last 2 Weeks, Last 2 Months, and Last 3 Months.This feature is currently behind the Feature Flag / Entitlement BE-DEV_PROD_NEW_INTERVALS_ENABLED_TENANTS and FE-SHOW_TRELIS_NEW_INTERVAL.
5. Github Actions in SEI: Added support for native Github Actions integration on SEI. This feature is a beta feature that is behind the entitlement ALLOW_GITHUB_ACTION_TILE.

Self-Managed Enterprise Edition

1. Continuous Integration: Re-run in Debug Mode now supports Python and PowerShell Core (pwsh). You can also now use debug mode for local runner build infrastructures. The remote debugging functionality is behind a feature flag, CI_REMOTE_DEBUG.
2. Delegate task configuration Update: Harness added the ability to acquire only the configured maximum number of tasks. This allows Harness Manager to use the task capacity to determine whether to assign a task to the delegate or queue it. This functionality is behind a feature flag, DELEGATE_TASK_CAPACITY_CHECK.
3. Continuous Delivery & GitOps: Added a new field in the release history for Blue Green deployments to differentiate between environments. Enable the feature flag, CDS_BG_STAGE_SCALE_DOWN_STEP_NG to leverage this feature.
4. Continuous Delivery & Gitops: Kubernetes deployments support HorizontalPodAutoscaler and PodDisruptionBudget for Blue Green and Canary execution strategies

Full Early Access Release Notes

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