Blog

Enhancements

• Added support for the Version Manager for Jira plugin. The presence of the additional permission "Manage Versions" is automatically detected and assigned to the project roles ADMIN and MASTER. Therefore, the plugin effectively allows MASTERs and not only ADMINs to manage versions for their project. To change it for an existing project, simply Edit and Save the project again.
• Switched from classic session handling (JSESSIONID) to JSON Web Token (JWT). See https://jwt.io/introduction for more information. From the perspective of the user, this change is mostly invisible. If you are a REST API pilot customer, please note that the token expires quickly and needs to be renewed. The curl examples shown on the swagger page in the DevOps Portal already use JWT and can be used as is. To support M2M communication in the future, we plan to add Technical Users for the Portal REST API.
• The link DOaaS Metrics was added to the Grafana tile on the Home page. It leads to the DevOps-as-a-Service Metrics which are available for every user who has the Grafana tool assigned. For more information, see Grafana DOaaS Metrics

Improvements

• Added official AI Operator logo on the Home page for projects which are using this tool.
• Prepare support for sending email notifications from Gitea.
• The menu item Account → Sign out will now immediately logout from the DevOps Portal and all tools without a confirmation question.
• Actions performed by DOaaS Operators like e.g. a project resync, which could be necessary after an update, are now visible in the audit log for Portal Admins.

Bugfixes

• Some manually constructed URLs could result in an HTTP error code of 500 instead of 404. This is fixed now.

New feature

• The DevOps Portal is now supporting auto-provisioning Grafana. Grafana  is the leading open-source tool for monitoring and visualizing data from sources such as Prometheus, Loki, Databases, and more. It allows users to create interactive dashboards and set-up alerts to monitor application metrics as well as system performance and trends in real time. Grafana is rolled-out in May for all customers. You can add Grafana to any of your existing projects. This adds the Grafana tile to the Homepage of your project on the DevOps Portal.
  
  See Grafana concerning all details of the integration.

Improvements

• Improved possibilities to support customers within their Portal.
• Updated design to new T-Systems logo.
• The regular expression used to validate email addresses is now stricter than before to spot impossible addresses earlier in the onboarding process of new users.
• Improved formatting of long audit log entries.
• In addition, includes all improvements from DevOps Portal 1.8.6 

Improvements

• On the Projects page, the link to AI Engineer is now directly linking to the distinct project inside AI Engineer.
• Further improvements of the audit log entries so that with one glance you can immediately see what value has been changed for the affected entity.
• Passwords for Technical Users now have to match the rules for passwords for human users concerning character classes. This means that at least one lower case letter, one upper case letter, one digit and one special character have to be used. The minimum length stays at 32 characters, whereas for human users 12 characters are sufficient. We recommend to simply use the automatically generated random password when creating new Technical Users.
• Made sure that future design changes in the Keycloak pages don't require clearing the browser cache to get visible.

Enhancements

• More links have beed added in the AI Engineer tile on the Portal Homepage. All links are directly leading to the specific AI features available for the selected Project.
• More code has been added for the upcoming SonarQube automation enhancement, which was already described in  DevOps Portal 1.7.5.

Improvements

• A work-around concerning Jenkins had to be applied for the improvement introduced in DevOps Portal 1.7.5 to keep it working in recent Jenkins versions.

Bugfixes

• Since some special characters made problems when used in passwords of Technical Users, the allowed characters have been now restricted to 7 Bit ASCII.

Enhancements

• The new Rest API now offers endpoints for listing, adding and removal of project roles.
• When searching for user entries with accents or transliterations it is now no longer required to know the exact verbatim spelling. For example searching for the name "Muller" will now also find "Müller". This simplifies finding specific users a lot.

Improvements

• The number of remaining users based on your package size is now displayed on the Users page.
• Project Admins can set the Project lead in Jira projects on the page Project Settings ➡ Users and roles. Press the button "Edit defaults" in the top right corner like shown in the screenshot:
  
  The Project lead has more a symbolic function. Being a Project lead does not add more permissions to the user, but the Project lead can be set to be the default assignee of new issues. Previously the DevOps Portal has reset the Project lead to SDCloud Admin on every project save or resync. This was changed now. If Project lead was set to something different than the DevOps Portal service account, it will be preserved.
• The Audit Log has been improved to avoid any unnecessary information in the log entries. Will be even more improved in a future version.
• A robots.txt file is now forbidding web crawlers to scan your public pages of the DevOps toolchain. Please open a Service Request, if you want to have your public content indexed by search engines.

Bugfixes

• The More menu on the Users page has been moved to be more readable for all windows sizes.
• Some minor design issues on the login page have been fixed. If it doesn't work for you, please use Shift-Reload on the page or clear your browser cache.

Enhancements

• Customers of the Competitive Toolchain use Gitea for Issue-Tracking and Agile Boards. Now all projects automatically get a well-established set of advanced defaults for labels which can be used to categorize issues. To get it enabled for a specific existing project, edit and save it or resync the project. The complete list of labels is:
  • Compat: Breaking
  • Kind: Bug, Documentation, Enhancement, Feature, Security, Testing
  • Priority: Critical, High, Medium, Low
  • Reviewed: Confirmed, Duplicate, Invalid, Won't Fix
  • Status: Abandoned, Blocked, Need More Info

Improvements

• The scrolling in the new user selection box on the Projects page has been improved.
• The layout of the footer on the login page has been aligned with the footer of the DevOps Portal.
• All remaining LDAP code has been removed from the DevOps Portal.
• Added support for JWT tokens in the Portal back-end.
• Implemented more automated E2E tests.

Bugfixes

• Some permissions for roles in Gitea were not exactly set as planned. This mostly applies only to users of the Competive Toolchain, who are using Gitea for Issue-Tracking and Source Code Management. One missing permission was Create Repositories for MASTERs. To get it fixed for a specific existing project, edit and save it or resync the project.
• In some cases, the menu bar was not correctly colored. This has been fixed. The current page gets a magenta title, and there's a grey background when hovering with the mouse over any menu item. If it does not perfectly work for you, please clear your browser cache.

This version was only released for customers of the Competitive Toolchain due to Gitea and XWiki improvements.

Enhancements

• Gitea is now also supported for issue-tracking and agile boards. Therefore, a new tile has been added to the home page of the DevOps Portal.
• A new tile has also been added for XWiki, which links to the sub wiki, which represents the current project in XWiki.

Improvements

• Potentially dangerous permissions granted inside XWiki sub wikis have been removed from roles maintained by DevOps Portal.
• Creating a new project in XWiki can take several minutes since all themes and extensions have to be installed into the new sub wiki. The auto provisioning code has been improved to avoid any problems with such long-running tasks.
• USER_SETTINGS_CHANGE events will no longer be recorded in the audit log, since they just talk about unimportant changes like last selected project of the current user etc.
• The max length of recorded audit log entries has been extended to also show very long messages.

Bugfixes

• The processing of an unexpected AI Engineer response has been adapted to avoid possible pending syncs when resyncing a project.
• Changing the color of page titles from black to magenta was not working in all possible cases.

Improvements

• The database for the DevOps Portal has been upgraded from PostgreSQL v12 to v14 for all instances.
• The new RestAPI has been enabled for more pilot customers.

Enhancements

• XWiki is now fully supported concerning auto provisioning in the DevOps Portal. This allows customers to use XWiki  as an alternative to Confluence.
• The tools Confluence and AI Operator have now been automatically connected in all projects which use both tools. This consumes one Confluence license per project, but allows all project members to ask questions about the Confluence content in AI Operator. Therefore, a very secure solution for adding AI power to your knowledge base has been added to DevOps-as-a-Service.
• The user selection box on the projects page has been replaced by a new solution which includes a search functionality. This helps a lot, finding the correct user, esp. for instances with thousands of users. In addition, the Projects page loads now a lot faster.
• The ApacheDS LDAP server has been completely removed, as all functionality was transferred to Keycloak. All users had to update their password to transfer it from ApacheDS to Keycloak. Users which have not yet set their password can at any time use the Forgotten Password function to do so.

Improvements

• Gitea license calculation has been updated to correctly reflect implicitly created tech users for pushing and pulling.

Bugfixes

• On the Users page the width of the columns is no longer changing when scrolling through the list

Enhancements

• Code has been added which will be later used by the Jenkins Shared Library to allow even better integration of SonarQube within DevOps-as-a-Service. The first planned feature is the possibility to automatically connect Bitbucket git repositories with SonarQube results. This will enable the Pull-request decoration in Bitbucket which is supported by SonarQube instances with Developer or Enterprise licenses. The second planned feature will allow the delivery pipeline to set the desired quality gate for the git repository.
• A new RestAPI v2 has been added for pilot customers, which can be used to automate actions in the DevOps Portal. The API will be released for all customers when all important calls have been added.

Improvements

• For larger customers with possibly hundreds of projects, DevOps Portal will now configure longer intervals for the Bitbucket organization folders in Jenkins. This will ensure that the load on the Jenkins controller is not getting too high due to continuously checking for new git repositories on Bitbucket.

Bugfixes

• When the user changes the project on the Home page, some links in the tiles have to be updated. When the new link was arriving too slow, it could happen that a link was still pointing to the previously selected project. This has been changed, so that the link will be a general one until the new project information has been retrieved.
• The selection box for the current project on the Home page was not properly losing focus when a new project had been selected. This led to the problem that the first click on one of the links was swallowed. This is fixed now.
• The portal role of a user was not properly displayed on the user details page, if the logged-in user was not a Portal Admin.
• When an organization was created containing some specific special characters, it could happen that the success message was not properly readable.