Seeq Server R64.0.0

Welcome to Seeq! If you have any feedback or support questions, please log a support ticket via the Seeq Support Portal.

For each user that accesses the Seeq Workbench for the first time, a fully interactive tour will present itself to assist the user in learning how to use our software. The tour can be dismissed and accessed later via the system menu in the upper-right corner of Seeq Workbench.

Upgrade Considerations

Best Practices

Before upgrading, it is recommended that you create a backup of your current Seeq Server. That way you can restore your application version, configuration and data files to known good if for some reason there is an issue with the upgrade. To create a backup, follow the instructions in the Backing Up the Seeq Database article in the Seeq Knowledge Base.

The Seeq Server database schema is upgraded automatically when a new version of Seeq Server first loads a data folder created by an older version of Seeq Server. The blue text at the bottom of the Seeq Server launch interface is intended to give insight into upgrade progress.

When upgrading, it is recommended that you update the Seeq Server and all Seeq Remote Agents at the same time. Each version of Seeq is tested as a whole and breaking changes between the Seeq Server and older Seeq Remote Agents are not tracked.

Automatic Item Deletion

In R64.0.0, the Automatic Item Deletion job is enabled by default. This is the recommended behavior to ensure the best Seeq performance and lightest load on the database. This job will delete signals and worksteps that are unused and have been archived for over 180 days. See the Features/AutomaticItemDeletion/* configurations to adjust or disable the job.

OData Upgrade

In R63.0.0, The OData 4.0 protocol has been added. Please visit the OData Exports page in https://support.seeq.com for more information.

Datasource Caching on by Default

In R62.0.0, newly created datasources will have their Cache Enabled property set to true by default. This is the recommended behavior to ensure the best Seeq performance and lightest load on the datasource. If you wish to override this behavior, set the Datasource/Cache/Enabled configuration option to false. Consider increasing the size of the persistent series cache using the Cache/Persistent/Series/MaxSize configuration option.

Seeq Data Lab Upgrade

In R62.0.0, Seeq Data Lab has upgraded and added Python packages. Please visit Preinstalled Packages for the list of the latest installed packages.

Formula Changes

In R62.0.0, the behavior of join() near now was changed. When a matching end capsule can't be found, it now emits a capsule that ends at now() instead of at the uncertainty transition of the end condition. The uncertainty of the output was not changed, only the capsules during the uncertainty region.

Aggregate operator correction

A bug (CRAB-34503) was identified for specific inputs to the aggregate function in R57, R58, and R59. The issue is fixed in R57.3.0, R58.2.0, R59.1.0, and R60+. To ensure accurate data, a migration to clear potentially affected caches will begin at startup and run in the background if upgrading from an affected version. This migration will have temporary performance impacts beyond typical background migrations.

While the background migration runs, formula requests will encounter a small processing overhead to determine if they may be affected by the bug. Any formulas determined to be potentially affected will temporarily have persistent caching disabled to avoid using persisted data that may have been affected.

Upgrade Path

Upgrading Seeq Server on Microsoft Windows platforms to version R59.0.0 or higher is not supported. Seeq Remote Agents on Microsoft Windows platforms can be upgraded to R59.0.0 and beyond. If you are running Seeq Server on Microsoft Windows, please reach out to your Seeq Customer Success Manager, your Seeq Reseller, or Seeq Technical Support to discuss your options.

When upgrading to Seeq Server R59.0.0 or later from a Seeq Server version before R58.0.0, an intermediate upgrade to the latest R58 release is required. Installers and release notes for all previous releases are available here. All asynchronous background upgrades must complete on the intermediate version before proceeding with the upgrade to version R59.0.0 or later.

Run seeq diag migration from the Seeq CLI to check the status of asynchronous background upgrades.

Postgres 14 Upgrade

Starting in R59.0.0, Seeq's database store is upgraded from version 12 to version 14.4. This new version contain several features that will benefit regular Seeq operations and database health, such as less space taken up on disk.

The upgrade time is heavily dependent on disk speed and total database table size, as well as a number of other factors. As an example on a system with 98,000 IOPS (Input Output Operations Per Second) and a disk throughput of 3200 MB/s, the upgrade will take approximately 1 minute per 4 GB of total table size. For a slower system with 7700 IOPS and a throughput of 200 MB/s, the upgrade will take around 1 minute per 1.5 GB of total table size. To see the total size of all tables in the database, you can run seeq db stats -v in the Seeq CLI and sum the values in the table column of the Table Sizes table.

Aggregate operator correction

Bug CRAB-35028 exposed a rare scenario where an aggregate may produce incorrect results. It only affects signals that were re-cached by versions 58.0-58.2.1 or 59.0-59.1.0 where the linear input signal to the aggregate had a discontinuity directly aligned with the left edge of the capsule of interest. Clearing the cache on these items will fix the results.

Migration of Boundaries to Threshold Metrics

In R58.0.0, all boundaries (ancillaries) will be converted to threshold metrics. These metrics can be found by searching for "(old boundary name) Boundary". Existing worksteps that contain boundaries should be visually unaffected by this change.

Threshold Metric Priority Configurations

In R59.0.0, changing the Features/Colors/Priorities configuration would alter newly created threshold metrics. Previously, an existing metric could be updated by clearing its cache after the configuration change. Now to update existing metrics, modify the metric formula.

ADX Connector no longer supports Username / Password Authentication

Previously the ADX connector allowed username / password authentication to access data within ADX. This functionality has been deprecated by Microsoft and users must now create a service principal as documented here: ADX Connection Configuration

Topics no longer support UserGroup access for content

If a topic from R54 or earlier was using a User Group for its contents' access control, a user must be chosen and saved from the topic's homescreen "Edit" dialog. Until this action is taken, content will not load in that topic.

Authentication configuration refined

In R61.0.0 the authentication system was refined to simplify its configuration and operation. User sessions will now expire after a fixed period from when they were created, ensuring the user logs into the system no less frequently than the expiration duration.

• Authentication/AccessKey/ValidityWithoutUserLogin - Now defaults to 14 days and refers just to the last time the user last logged in, irrespective of any active sessions they may have. For details please see the in-product documentation for this configuration option. Any pre-existing values greater than 0 or less than 14 will be removed in a one-time migration and the default will be used. Any other pre-existing value for this option will be preserved.
• Authentication/DefaultSessionDuration - Now defaults to 7 days and specifies the maximum length of time before a user must log in again, irrespective of their activity while logged in. For details please see the in-product documentation for this configuration option. Any pre-existing values are removed in a one-time migration and the default will be used.

Transform operator strictness

In R61.0.0 the transform and transformToX operators will report some errors that previously would have been warnings instead. This avoids problems where an error (such as a disconnected datasource) resulted in an empty result rather than a failure and error message.

In general, using other operators such as aggregate will result in better performance and more predictable results than transform operators.

SQL Connector Changes for Querying for Conditions

Starting in R61, the SQL connector has changed its behaviour when querying for condition data. To optimize how Seeq queries for data, the connector now checks for null start AND end times, which can cause a problem when the end time is a calculated value. It is recommended to create a subquery to create the calculated end time as described in the SQL query definition guide.

MySQL JDBC Driver Upgrade

Starting in R64, the JDBC Driver has been upgraded to 8.2.0 from 5.1.47. This resolves a number of security issues and provides support for the latest MySQL releases. This version drops support for version 5.6, however. If you are on version 5.6, please upgrade to at least 5.7 prior to the upgrade. Changes in MySQL Connector/J 8.2.0.

API Changes

• In R58.0.0, the keyUnitOfMeasure property was removed from the POST /conditions/{id}/capsules endpoint. As a result, all capsules are now treated as absolute time with units of nanoseconds.
• In R59.0.0, the output properties background and enabled were renamed to isBackground and isEnabled respectively and archived was removed for POST /content/date-ranges, GET /content/date-ranges, POST /content/date-ranges/{id}, GET /content/date-ranges/{id} endpoints.
• In R59.0.0, OData exports (and all other Appserver operations) have less memory available by default. If your server runs large or frequent exports, consider increasing the Memory/Appserver/Size or Memory/Appserver/OData/MaxEstimatedMemoryUtilization configuration options. Symptoms of having too little memory include exports returning 502 Bad Gateway responses or 400 responses with a "This OData export is estimated to be larger than the server configuration allows..." error message.
• In R60.0.0 for non-admin users, the isAdmin property in UserOutputV1 will return None for all user records except the current user's record. Setting Features/UsersQueriesAdminOnly/Enabled to False will allow the value of the isAdminproperty to be True or False for all user records.
• In R60.0.0, some cache endpoints that were available for testing and diagnostics have been modified:
  • The GET /items/{id}/cache endpoint has been removed
  • The cacheLayer parameter for the DELETE /items/{id}/cache endpoint has been removed
  • The cachedRegions field has been removed from CacheInfoV1
• In R60.0.0, the batch POST endpoints for signals, conditions, scalars, and assets have been updated to accept a new field in the item inputs, previousDataId. When provided, the previousDataId is used to look up an existing item, which if found will have its Data ID changed from previousDataId to dataId. To accommodate this change without affecting single-item POSTs, new models are introduced in the SDKs for scalars and assets, PutScalarInputV1 and PutAssetInputV1, respectively. These have the previousDataId field while the original ScalarInputV1 and AssetInputV1 do not. Users of the connector SDKs will not need to account for these changes right away, as the associated putScalar and putAsset methods have been updated to accept either input.
• In R60.0.0, the GET /usage endpoint has been modified. This function now accepts an optional unit parameter. The UsageOutputV1 now has an additional credits value.
• In R61.0.0 the endpoint for sending an email has changed such that the POST /notify/sendEmail endpoint is now available at POST /api/notify/send-email. This endpoint can now be accessed using the SDK.
• In R61.0.0 the POST workbook/id/renderer endpoint's identityId query parameter is renamed to userId to better reflect that it only supports user ids as input.
• In R61.0.0, the /add-ons, /plugins, and /system/configuration/addOnTools endpoints have been modified to enable non-administrators to install extensions to Seeq. Non-admins who are a member of the configured Features/AddOns/InstallAddOnsForSelf group (Everyone by default) may install those types using the new inDevelopment flag. Items that are In Development may not be shared with other users, but are available for the user who installed them. Seeq now tracks and outputs the Installer for these item types. Plugins no longer support a Security String in their plugin.json configuration file; they may have their permissions managed from the Administration Page or the Add-on Manager instead.
• In R61.0.0, the response of /notification-configurations/{id} was slightly changed. The field userId was renamed into identityId in toEmailRecipients, ccEmailRecipients, and bccEmailRecipients. The value can be the identifier of a user or user group.
• In R61.0.0, the response of /notification-configurations/unsubscribe/{id} was enhanced with removedEntries that contains the number of email notification entries removed from the database.
• In R61.0.0, the input and response for /notification-configurations/{id} renamed the contextUrl field to contextualText.
• In R62.0.0, the POST /logs/send endpoint has new input fields that allow additional information to be attached when submitting a support request.
• In R62.0.0, the GET /items endpoint was updated to accept a new query parameter includeProperties that can be used to specify a list of properties to include in the items returned. If a single element @allProperties is specified in the includeProperties list, all properties of each item will be returned in the associated ItemSearchPreviewV1. Calls to the searchItems method of the ItemsApi in the Java and C# SDKs must be updated to include an argument for includeProperties; the Python and Javascript SDKs are not affected.
  The ItemSearchPreviewV1 has two new properties. includedProperties is a map of property names to ScalarPropertyV1 objects, which is populated if includeProperties was specified in the request. parameters is the list of FormulaParameterOutputV1 parameters used in calculations; it will also only be populated if includeProperties is requested with @allProperties or FormulaParameters.
• In R62.0.0, the GET /system/server-status endpoint will only return the information required to render the login page unless the acting user has been authenticated. The output still contains the full result for authenticated users.
• In R62.0.0, properties of Capsules from JVM Agent connectors that have different units of measure from the ones specified in the Condition metadata will be removed.
• In R62.0.0, the outputs of the /export endpoints have been expanded to enable OData export configurations to edited. The POST /export endpoint now returns a complete ExportItemsOutputV1 instead of just the href. The ExportItemsOutputV1 object has newly added properties: gridOrigin, timeZone, and href.
• In R63.0.0, the capsuleTable operator returns a timestamp for the column, Original Uncertainty indicating the start of the capsule uncertainty. Prior to R63.0.0, the Original Uncertainty column contained a boolean
• In R63.0.0, the scheduled notebooks which have been moved, renamed or deleted from a project without unscheduling them first will be automatically unscheduled and a notification will be sent to the user who scheduled the notebook. Prior to R63.0.0, the scheduled notebook remained scheduled with no execution taking place.
• In R63.0.0, the GET /content/report/{reportId} endpoint no longer returns the `sourceWorkstepBlob` and `currentWorkstepBlob` fields unless the `includeWorkstepBlobs` query parameter is set to true.
• In R63.0.0, the Python SDK will serialize Python UUIDs to strings and timedeltas to float seconds when serializing to JSON. Additionally, time zone naive datetimes used to raise an ApiError with a status of 400 and a message about date-format while time zone aware datetimes were serialized to UTC. Now, time zone naive datetimes will raise an ApiError with a status of 400 and a message indicating that a time zone is required.

Change Notes

Some new features and bug fixes may also be available in point releases of previous major versions. Release notes for previous releases are available here.

The Seeq Data Lab images for R64.0.0 include the Seeq Python (SPy) module version 190.18. The SPy change log can be found here.

Version R64.0.0

New Features

Bug Fixes

Known Issues