New features
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New features
Engage
Updated appearance of Engage notifications
To improve the readability of questions and answers, campaign notifications have a refreshed look and feel on the Windows operating system, approaching the philosophy of Engage on macOS.
Starting from Windows Collector V6.24, answers to campaign questions are arranged vertically and the width of notifications is kept uniform, so that end users experience a gentler transition between questions.
Collector connectivity and assignment
Collector communicates via TCP port 443 by default
To simplify network management, the Collector now sends all data through TCP port 443 by default. Sending data through a single well-known port reduces the chances of firewalls blocking Collector traffic. Communication through TCP port 443 cannot rely on the default set of certificates generated during Appliance federation though. To enable the communication of Collector data through TCP port 443, replace the default digital certificates in the Appliance by your own custom certificates or reload them in case of migration. When migrating, Appliances keep their previous configuration to communicate with your installed base of Collectors; therefore you need to make the changes manually. Contact Nexthink Customer Success Services in case of doubt.
Nevertheless, it is still possible to configure Collectors to either send all data through a custom TCP port (above TCP 1024) or send activity data through UDP, as in previous versions of Nexthink; although the latter is no longer recommended.
The Cloud offering of Nexthink requires a custom TCP port for the Collector (default 8443), as TCP port 443 is not supported yet.
Local IP address to assign Collectors
The Collector now reports the local IP address of the device; that is, the IP address of the device in the local network. The local IP address provides an alternative to the conventional IP address of the device, which is obtained from the source IP address of Collector packets and thus subject to change in transit if network address translation takes place; that is, if the device and the Engine lie on different networks. This is always the case, for example, when Collectors report to an instance of Nexthink in the Cloud.
The new local IP address can be used in place of or in combination with the conventional IP address of the device to write the rules for assigning Collectors to Engines.
Assigning Collectors to Appliances with multiple names
When entering the network parameters of the Nexthink Appliances, administrators can specify more than one fully qualified domain name (DNS name) or IP address per Appliance. Remember that only the first of the external DNS names specified is used for rule-based Collector assignment.
Finder improvements
Both the user and the device views in the Finder display up to ten score tabs. On some screens, not all tabs fit simultaneously.
Now the Finder includes a navigation tool that let you scroll through the score tabs when they do not fit on the screen.
Cross-Engine search without auto-complete
To enable search across Engines in setups where the connectivity between Finder and Portal is limited, specify a new intermediate level of Cross-Engine features that includes the search but not the auto-complete feature, which might be too costly in terms of network resources.
APIs and integrations
Two new APIs let you retrieve information about services and connected Engines programmatically from the Portal Appliance and NXQL now fully supports JSON output.
Services API
Programmatically retrieve data about the health and performance of the IT services monitored by Nexthink as perceived by the end users.
List Engines API
Programmatically retrieve the list of Engines that are linked to the Portal, including their connection status.
NXQL fully supports JSON output
Responses to NXQL queries can come in different formats. The available output formats are CSV, HTML, XML and JSON. The JSON output format was offered as a technical preview until now. Starting from V6.24, JSON format is fully supported as output format for NXQL queries.
Login and access
Protection of local accounts
To protect local accounts against brute force attacks, a local account is temporarily blocked after five failed login attempts.
Portal error pages
The default server pages that indicate an error in the connection of the web browser to the Portal have been replaced by custom error pages that keep the look and feel of the Portal.
Helping Support diagnose your issues
After contacting Nexthink Support, you are usually requested to download a diagnostics script to your Appliances. The results of executing this Support script are an invaluable resource for the Support team to pinpoint the cause of any issue on your Appliances. However, the script had to be manually downloaded and executed from the CLI of the impacted Appliances.
Starting from V6.24, the Support script is included in all Nexthink Appliances by default and you can run it comfortably from the Web Console.