Published Release Notes

Easily build components for applications

A component is a collection of rulesets that you use to create a small feature that can enhance an application. You can now create components that can be applied to applications created in the Pega 7 Platform. You can create and configure components on the new Component rule form and manage them on the Application rule form. Each component creates its own ruleset, which prevents naming conflicts from occurring if, for example, you install two components with the same name. You can upload or download any component from the Pega Exchange.

For more information, see Components.

Existing operator IDs during upgrades and updates

Upgrades and updates are always performed in secured mode to help prevent unauthorized access to your system. In secured mode, the [email protected] operator ID is always overwritten, but other existing standard operator IDs are not modified. New operator IDs are inserted in secured mode. For more information, see the Deployment Guide for your environment.

Trace agents from the Agent Management landing page

You can now trace an agent on any node in the cluster from the Agent Management landing page without logging in to the individual nodes. From this landing page, you also specify when to trace an agent.

For more information, see Tracing agents.

Client page load statistic enhancements

The client page load statistic is the total elapsed time from when the user clicks to when the screen has finished rendering, including network time and time spent in the browser. This statistic gives you visibility into system performance, allowing you to address performance issues in a timely manner. The client page load statistic is now available for usage reporting through the Log-Usage class and in the System Management Application (SMA). In addition, a new alert, PEGA0069, is generated when the page load duration is greater than the threshold. The threshold is set by using the following prconfig.xml file setting:

<env name="alerts/browser/clientPageLoadTimeThreshold/warnMS" value="<milliseconds>" />

The default is 4000 milliseconds.

For more information, see PEGA0069 alert - Client page load time has exceed the alert threshold.

System starts slowly after upgrade or update on IBM DB2 for z/OS

Additional tables are added to upgraded and updated systems. If your system starts up very slowly after an upgrade or update, the database statistics on these new tables might not have generated correctly. To correct this issue and improve performance, your database administrator needs to manually rebuild the statistics for all tables in the rules schema.

Simplified support for external log management systems

Simplified support for external log management systems such as ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) makes it easier to implement an external log management system. An external log management system can improve access to system log files that help diagnose and debug issues by eliminating the need to download log files from each node in the cluster.

For information about configuring ELK, see Configuring ELK for log management.

For information about using Kibana to view log files, see Pega logs in Kibana.

Clustering equal to none might cause errors

Some Pega 7 Platform features might not work when theidentification/cluster/protocolsetting in the prconfig.xml file is set to none. Some features that might not work are remote tracing and management actions on the node from the Requestor Management and Agent Management landing pages. Setting the clustering protocol to none is not recommended and will not be supported in a future Pega 7 Platform release.

Search reindexing is automatically triggered

Reindexing on index host nodes is now triggered automatically when no other index node exists in the cluster, eliminating the need for you to manually clean up old items and start reindexing. In addition, offline index host nodes are removed as index host nodes during normal shutdown and startup of any node in the cluster. As a result, you might have to add back a node as an index host node on the Search landing page. You can configure a node to always be an index host node or to never be an index host node by using the JVM -Dindex.directory option as described in Managing Elasticsearch index host nodes outside of the Search landing page.

You can turn off automatic reindexing by using the indexing/distributed/automodecleanupandreindex Dynamic System Setting.

Node classification feature

With the node classification feature, you can group production nodes by different node types to segregate nodes by their purpose. Currently, agents and listeners can be associated with node types. If you start a node with a specific node type, the node runs only the associated agents and listeners for that node type. This enhancement improves performance and optimizes resources.

For more information, see Configuring node types for agents and listeners, Mapping listeners to node types, and Mapping agents to node types.

Default quiesce strategy changed to immediate drain

The default quiesce strategy has been changed to immediate drain, which allows you to continue to access a quiescing node to perform actions until the node is removed from the load balancer, regardless of your user role. When immediate drain is enabled, and a node is in the quiesce state, the requestor state is saved after every interaction. After the node has been removed from the load balancer, the saved state can be used to restore the requestor state on a new node in the next interaction with the server.

You can change the quiesce strategy default to slow drain by modifying the value of the session/ha/quiesce/strategy setting in the prconfig.xml file to be slowDrain.