What’s new in Avantra 24.2

It’s my pleasure to announce the release of Avantra 24.2. The second update of Avantra 24, building upon 24.1 which brought performance and customer requested bug fixes, 24.2 brings new innovations and enhancements to our Avantra platform. With over 300 changes in our development management system, Avantra 24.2 feels like a major release to us and we have something new everywhere you look.

Let’s dive deeper into the new features. For a complete list of changes, check out our public release notes.

Automation

In Avantra 24.1 we introduced several components that we built upon in this release, conditional logic and loops. We’ve made loops much more powerful in 24.2, enabling embedded loops across any list, not just system selectors. With this, our automation users can build workflows that perform actions per SAP client, per item retrieved from an API call, in parallel or sequential, or whatever the business logic demands.

We’ve also improved how our built in looping works across system selectors in that starting a workflow with a selector now doesn’t create an individual workflow execution per system but a combined workflow that executes in parallel so you can keep the executions together in the UI.

But I’ve buried the most important change in 24.1 and greatly improved in 24.2; executing steps on the Avantra server itself. Automations can now run logic on the server to determine how and what to execute for the rest of the workflow. These steps have access to a powerful new API that allows you to read data from Avantra itself to list systems, query checks and even create external checks. You can then use this information to execute steps over each instance of an SAP system, all servers in a selector or on each productive SAP client and perform subsequent actions for each.

This is the first version of our server side JavaScript API (as we’ve been calling it internally) and we are keen to get our customers’ feedback on how you will use it and what other features we can make available for you. Please let us know.

Next generation user experience

With Avantra 24.2 we take a significant step forward with our next generation UX project, releasing a couple of features that are unique here; Advanced Dashboard Sharing and Managed Object Bulk Edit.

Firstly I want to talk about Bulk Edit. We’ve had multiple customer requests for scripts or features that allow you to change a setting across multiple servers or SAP systems at once in a more convenient way. With Avantra 24.2 this is now built into the new UI with quick and easy options to change configuration on mass!

We’re also rolling out more friendly ways to do common actions with managed objects that you know and are used to in the classic UI. We’re busy implementing a Message Center that changes how you interact with Avantra when actions don’t go according to plan, with the first version in 24.2 and more coming in 24.3 and beyond.

With dashboards in the classic UI, we had a mechanism to share dashboards with non Avantra users, the “Auto Login User”, however this was cumbersome to use as you needed to create the user and sort out permissions manually. With new dashboards, we designed a way to create sharing links to a dashboard, handling all permissions for you, setting expiry and allowed domains to enable embedding of that dashboard in iframes/external sites from right in the settings of the dashboard itself.

Additionally, you can create multiple links to the same dashboard! That way, dashboards become templates that display different customer data depending on the link used, greatly simplifying dashboard management and providing a consistent experience for your customers.

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with the new dashboarding experience. Our legacy/classic UI dashboards have been deprecated since 24.0 and we’re looking at how we can migrate our customers to the new experience, so do let us know your experience!

Observability

With Avantra 24.2 we’ve introduced a new instance type to monitor the SAP Content Server. This feature has been much requested by customers to allow them to detect, manage and monitor SAP Content Servers from within Avantra. We’ve built upon our existing checks for the SAP Web Dispatcher, now also available for the SAP Content Server, with a brand new check for monitoring the status of the SAP Content Server itself (CS_Status). With Avantra 24.1 we also introduced a new ABAP based check to monitor an SAP’s connectivity to an SAP Content Server (SAPContentServerConnectivity).

Additionally for SAP S/4HANA systems we can now determine whether they are running in RISE or managed clouds and this S/4HANA system type field is available within the UI and within system selectors.

Platform

With Avantra 24.2 we’re excited to introduce a new feature to synchronize credentials from an external Delinea Secret Server, instead of manually maintaining credentials. Right in the credentials tab, after enabling the connection in settings, you can choose to drag in credentials from the external provider and these will be used for checks and automations just like regular credentials are.

Delinea is the first external secret store provider we’ve enabled for this but we’re looking at others. If you use a specific external secret store provider, please let us know as the more feedback we receive from our customers, the more we can shape this roadmap.

For a long time, Avantra has had deep integration to cloud hyperscalers allowing our users to start/stop, extract data from and import virtual machines from GCP, Azure and AWS. With Avantra 24.2 it is now possible to delegate these start/stop actions to a designated gateway agent so that the Avantra server itself doesn’t need to store these powerful credentials centrally and you can use the default service account credentials assigned to the gateway’s VM itself for access.

Performance and security

Avantra 24.1 placed a strong emphasis on performance optimization, security enhancements and user interface improvements over features. Avantra 24.2 delivers more optimizations, specifically around database performance where we continually analyze performance of our internal and customer systems to identify where we can optimize. We’ve included a number of these optimizations in 24.2.

We’re also focussing on security by default. New installations of Avantra now have a number of security settings turned on automatically. These changes include cookie security settings, disabling HTTP ports, disabling GraphQL schema inspection and rate limiting the GraphQL API. 

These actions are also performed if you’ve made no manual settings for these in your installation previously. If your installation relied on these insecure defaults then upgrading may affect your installation. If you’re concerned, please conduct a test upgrade and reach out to customer support if you have any issues.

Conclusion

We are committed to continuously improving Avantra to meet the evolving needs of our customers. Avantra 24.2 is a testament to this commitment, providing you with the tools and insights needed to manage and automate your SAP environments more effectively than ever before.

A complete list of changes can be found in the 24.2 release notes on our documentation website.

At Avantra, we are delighted when our customers tell us about their experiences. Let us know what you are looking for in Avantra by creating an idea at ideas.avantra.com, email us at support@avantra.com or speak to your customer success manager.

Talk to an Avantra expert and find out how Avantra can transform your SAP landscape.