What's New in 3.9

Platform Independency

The current 3.9 release seamlessly continues our efforts to establish the HAKOM TSM as a platform-independent base technology. After important milestones like PostgreSQL and Azure SQL support, as well as porting the TSM API to .NET Standard and deployment of the WebTSM Services products as .NET Core, we continue with the following groundbreaking news:

• Support for .NET 6.0

WebTSM Services Evolution

The HAKOM WebTSM Services (REST Service) receives constant improvements. The following new functions are available in the current 3.9 release:

From 3.9.2

• Easier management of authorization rules

• Ability to control handling of NaN/Infinity values in calculations

• Grafana extension now part of the standard installation package

• More advanced search capabilities within the Grafana extension

• Improved access to time series meta-info for automatically generated clients

• Deletion of time series archive data

• Getting quotation dates for multiple time series

• Integration of Azure Application Insights

From 3.9.1

• New health check path for Kubernetes liveness and readiness checks (see health check section below)

• Pushing WebTSM Services configuration via environment variables in dockerized environments (see Docker environment variables section below)

• To help reducing database usage, authorization requests can use our new caching mechanism (see Authorization caching section below)

• Updated, user-friendly logging configuration

• Selective error response handling with the ability to choose whether to log or log and display error stack traces in response bodies

• StartOfDay and EndOfDay parameter for /calculations path (ad hoc formulas)

• GET Method added for /attributes/:attributeID path in order to access to the definition of a specific attribute

• Improved time zone handling features:

  • Output of time zone information in time series data timestamp format

  • Accepting time zone information as query parameter at all /data endpoints

From 3.9.0

• Timezone parameter for /calculations requests: allows setting timezone for adhoc calculation and output

• Lean Interface: the following deprecated parameters have been removed:

  • dateFormat and format → use same parameter in Accept/Content-Type request header

  • limit and offset → use Range header instead

• Improved security: /configuration path has been disabled, user and role management moved to /auth path

Health Checks

Checking system health is inevitable for automated management/deployment and scaling services in containerized environments. HAKOM WebTSM Services (REST Service) offers with release 3.9.1 a new health check service path with following kubernetes compatible functions:

• /health/ready: responds whether all components, that have been configured to be checked are available

• /health/live: responds whether the service runs and is accessible

Docker Environment Variables

If you are running HAKOM WebTSM Services as a Docker container, then with release 3.9.1 alternatively to mounting a HAKOM configuration file, you may directly pass specific configurations using environment variables. All options in the HAKOM configuration file can be overridden using environment variables using the following syntax:

HAKOMConfiguration_<SectionName_level_1>_<SectionName_level_n>_<KeyName>

Authorization Caching

With release 3.9.1 our authorization caching mechanism will help you utilizing your resources more efficiently. To reduce your database loads and boost up your request performance simply activate authorization caching via HAKOM configuration.

Usability and Stability

The current release also focuses on improving usability and increasing stability. We would like to emphasize the following innovations:

From 3.9.2

• Simplified time series search window for the master data administration plug-in

• Increased compatibility between custom functions, such as the TSAA function

• Oracle driver update due to a security vulnerability

• Powershell scripts for automated database installation on Microsoft SQL Server

• Support of PostgreSQL 14

• Support of PostgreSQL in cloud based environments

From 3.9.1:

• TSM Plugin: main GUI has been simplified, audit, quotation and ad hoc formula parameter can be expanded & collapsed

From 3.9.0:

• New HAKOM documentation space: easy accessible and enhanced documentation including roadmaps, get started & video guides: Video Tutorials

• TSM Plugin: edit time series definition simplified setting for audit, quotation and compressed time series in plugin GUI and master data export / import format
  
  

Performance Improvements

The already excellent performance of our products is further optimized with release 3.9, so that time series can be identified faster and time series data can be aggregated faster. We would like to highlight the following adjustments:

From 3.9.2

• Better performance wen loading historical data and quotations

• Performance improvements for SOAP services

From 3.9.1:

• Further improvements of time series search performance

• Enhanced performance with requesting quotation data

• Authorization caching mechanism (see WebTSM Services Evolution section above) 

From 3.9.0:

• Improved time series data read and write speed by optimized database access

• Enhanced attribute performance through redesigned attribute tables

• Async database calls in WebTSM Service provides better performance under multi-user / heavy request conditions
  
  

More Content

With the release 3.9.2 two additional products are now included as part of the standard installation package:

• TSM Data Interface

  • This tool provides functionality to import or export time series and their data and is highly customizable. More information on how the TSM Data Interface works can be found here: Data Interface

• WebTSM Services Grafana Extension

  • Makes it possible to connect Grafana to our WebTSM Services and create beautiful and insightful dashboards and charts based on time series data. More information may be found here: Grafana Extension

• Password Encryption Console
  

  • To encrypt database passwords in the configuration file or in the environment variables in advance, a new CLI has been implemented. Further information and usage instructions can be found here: Configuration - Password Encryption Console

Notes on Backwards Compatibility

Attention Release 3.9 has the following limitations regarding backwards compatibility:

As of 3.9.2:

• Microsoft .NET Update to .NET 6.0.

• Rebranding: TSM → PowerTSM

As of 3.9.1:

• WebTSM Services - Logging configuration: moved into a new confiuration xml element

• PostgreSQL versions below PG 11 are desupported

As of 3.9.0:

• Microsoft .NET Update to .NET 5.0.
  

• WebTSM Services - API versioning: removed support for versions below 3.8.7 LTS

• WebTSM Services - Parameters: removed deprecated parameters (limit, offset, dateFormat, format)
  

• WebTSM Services - Paths: removed /configuration path, /user and /roles paths moved under /auth path

• Master Data Export/Import format: previous format extended by 3 new mandatory columns (audit, quotation and compressed)

• Deprecated EvalComponent "Sum": have been removed
  

• As of 3.9.0: Oracle Unmanaged Driver: no longer supported