Forem: Syntropy Stack

Release Notes 22.20.13 - Bulk enabling/disabling services on Connections

Beata Lipska — Thu, 13 Oct 2022 10:24:48 +0000

Release Notes 22.10.13

Bulk enabling/disabling services on Connections

We're excited to present you with the latest release of Syntropy Stack. Now you are able to enable/disable the services on a specific connection in bulk. Head to the Connection section and pick the connection with services. Tick the services that you want to enable/disable, then click the Apply Changes button at the bottom of the table.

Our team has been tailoring the product to better align with upcoming features, and we hope these aesthetic and functional updates will also improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

Features

Enable/disable services on Connections in bulk

Improvements

Connections statuses improvements

Fixes

Updated Connections statuses styling in the connections info modal and Analytics page
Text readability improvements
UI fixes improving user experience in the graph section

Getting Started

Get started with Syntropy Stack with our three-minute quick start video, or follow the documentation for more details. Use Syntropy Stack to streamline your container and multi-cloud deployments and automate network orchestration.

Getting Involved

Our community helps us identify the correct problems to solve for our users whether you're an active user of one of our products or just getting started, join our community on Discord! We love to foster communication among developers. Also, don't hesitate to send us a message if you have feedback or need assistance. We're happy to help!

Release Notes 22.09.29 - SDN bulk enabling/disabling

Beata Lipska — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 11:44:38 +0000

We’re excited to present you with the latest release of Syntropy Stack. We’re introducing bulk actions for SDN in Connections table. Now the developers are able to enable or disable SDN for more than one connection. Our team has been tailoring the product to better align with upcoming features, and we hope these aesthetic and functional updates will also improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

Features

global/local SDN enabling/disabling in bulk at Connections

Improvements

Bi-directional visualisation of the Connections
Agent statuses improvements
added SDN agents logs to Admin Panel

Fixes

UI Platform related bugfixes

Getting Started

Getting Involved

Our community helps us identify the right problems to solve for our users. Whether you’re an active user of one of our products or just getting started, join our community on Discord! We love to foster communication among developers. Also, don’t hesitate to send us a message if you have feedback or need assistance. We're happy to help!

Terraform Integration

Beata Lipska — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 12:54:51 +0000

Release Notes 22.09.14 - Terraform Integration

Using Syntropy Stack as a developer just got way easier!
Thanks to popular demand by our community of devs, we’ve decided to create an integration between Syntropy Stack and Terraform, a popular Infrastructure-as-code tool.
The first step should be getting familiar with the possibilities that our provider offers. Feel free to jump into official documentation on Terraform's Registry or our (tutorial)[https://docs.syntropystack.com/docs/terraform].

Our team has been tailoring the product to better align with upcoming features, and we hope these aesthetic and functional updates will also improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

Terraform Integration Features

- Terraform Integration in Tools section


ability to plan and manage Syntropy infrastructure via Terraform
creating a virtual agent
managing the services on endpoints
creating new peer-to-peer connection between two endpoints
creating mesh network between specific endpoints

Improvements

- sunsetting Network as Code (replacement with Terraform)
Updating palette colors in UI Platform
JWT handling improvements
Status of declined invtation - if the invite is declined, inviting person will receive an email notification

Fixes

- Long names fix of the Agents visibility
UI fix related palette colors
Theme changing fix
Error handling fix of the invalid SDN handling

Getting Started

Getting Involved

Release Notes 22.07.07 - Public API and the documentation

Beata Lipska — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 13:18:48 +0000

We’re thrilled to present to you the latest release of Syntropy Stack. We are introducing the public API to enable you to work more efficiently and give you the programmatic access to manage your agents and connections between endpoints. You can learn about using it by reading our API reference documentation.

Features

ability to use the public API to:
- get a list of Agents
- create, update and delete Agent
- get the list of Connections
- create P2P and mesh Connection
- update and delete the Connection
- authorise Agents
- grant access via tokens with specific permissions

Improvements

minor internal improvements

Fixes

Fixed ability to generate the VPN network config by the user
- Fixed ability to activate the checkbox in the new account survey window
Modal title fitting long words

Getting Started

Getting Involved

Release Notes 22.06.22 - New Table Pagination and Minor Improvements

Beata Lipska — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 12:32:34 +0000

We're excited to present you with the latest release of Syntropy Stack. Our team has been tailoring the product to better align with upcoming features, and we hope these aesthetic and functional updates will also improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

We are releasing quite a few exciting improvements, including the brand new pagination for Endpoints, Connections and Audit tables (see the screenshot below). Above it we’re introducing a bunch of fixes related to both - functional and visual aspects of the platform including duplicated services appearing after consecutive CONTAINER_INFO events or visual issue with the provider icons.

As we progress our technology and grow the ecosystem, we listen closely to our community to build tools that matter. If you have any feedback or ideas, let’s talk on Discord.

Improvements

Improved Workspace invitation delivery mechanism
Significant improvements to Audit Log response speed
Improvements to the reCAPTCHA mechanism
Implemented endpoint tag length validation
Improved pagination in Endpoints, Connections and Audit tables ## Fixes
Fixed duplicated services appearing after consecutive CONTAINER_INFO events
Fixed Access token deletion
Fixed visual issues with provider icons
Fixed improperly trimmed long workspace names
Fixed Audit log pagination & filtering issues
Got rid of duplicated scrollbars in both token description and rules table areas
Fixed the visualization of locked endpoint fields
Fixed overlapping data values in the latency charts
Fixed broken user flow from Thresholds page, resulting in 404

Getting Started

Getting Involved

Release Notes 22.05.26 - Enterprise: Shared Workspaces and User Roles

Abdelrahman Omran — Thu, 26 May 2022 11:00:15 +0000

We're thrilled to present you with the latest and most advanced release of Syntropy Stack! Our team has been working diligently to achieve a remarkable milestone for enterprise customers. Syntropy Stack now fully supports shared workspaces and user-roles features across the platform. We hope these new enterprise features will improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

As we progress our technology and grow the ecosystem, we listen closely to our community to build tools that matter. If you have any feedback or ideas, let’s talk on Discord.

The Problem

Previously, the platform had a single user <> single workspace implementation. It was not possible to add more users to the same workspace, nor to join another shared workspace with the same email. That implementation had limits due to a lack of account management and a general lack of flexibility to manage multiple workspaces at once.

Due to common security practices, organizations do not want to have shared user accounts, instead they need a solution to have a team of people who work on the same network. Workspaces make that possible!

The Solution

Now, Syntropy Stack supports multiple users in the same workspace and enables usage by both individual and enterprise users. Users can belong to multiple workspaces, being able to manage those workspaces and vice versa - a workspace to be managed by multiple users at once.

How it works

The new workspaces solution consists of these building blocks:

Personal vs. Organization workspaces — Users are able to have their personal workspaces, as well as can belong to one or more other shared organization workspaces.
Users have the ability to create a shared organization workspace (different workspaces can be set for different stages - e.g. testing, staging, production).
Workspace admins have the ability to manage its settings, and user roles (admin, user, viewer).
Users are able to invite others to join a shared organization workspace.
Users can switch to a different workspace they belong to.

Platform Security

Two Factor Authentication

We take security very seriously. Syntropy Stack supports 2FA for accounts, and with the introduction of workspaces, we give admins the ability to require 2FA for all workspace users, to ensure the highest level of security. When enabled, all workspace users and invitees are required to enable 2FA for their accounts in order to join the workspace.

User Roles

Viewer — is able to see everything in the workspace, but cannot create, delete or edit anything.
User — is able to fully manage the network and has full visibility in the workspace, but cannot manage users.
Admin — has full privileges for network management in addition to user management as well (invite new users, set roles, delete users, etc.).

Create a new workspace

By default, all registered users have a Default workspace. Consider this as your personal workspace, however you can rename, delete or invite others to it. To create a new workspace, simply click the user menu top right, then click the plus button.

Once you click the plus button, a new dialog box opens to name your workspace, put a name, and click Create.

After the Create button is clicked, the dialog box updates with the result, saying the new workspace has been created successfully! Now you can click Done to close that dialog or click Switch to new workspace if you want to.

Switch to another workspace

You can switch between workspaces easily anytime with a single step, just open the user menu top right corner, then under workspaces select which workspace you want to switch to.

List workspace users and remove or change user roles

To list and manage workspace users, you can follow the following easy steps: open the top right corner user menu > under Settings and click on Workspace.

The page you'll see will list existing workspace users, with their roles, 2FA status, join date, and ability to remove them from the workspace, or change their role to something else. You have three different roles for different access levels.

List workspace invitees and revoke or resend invitations

Similar to how you listed workspace users, you can click on the Invited tab on the same page, which will list all users you invited to join the workspace, but they didn't join yet. You'll also have the ability to revoke or resend the invitation, in addition to changing their roles as well.

Invite users to a workspace

In order to invite users to join the workspace, you can click on Invite members upright the table, write the email addresses you want to invite, and select which role you want to grant.

Rename or Delete an existing workspace

You may want to rename the workspace, or delete it if you no longer need it, and to do these operations, on the workspace settings page, you can click the three dots '…' beside the workspace name, and you'll have both rename and delete options there.

Accept or reject a workspace invitation

When users get invited to join a workspace, they will get an email message and will see the invitation on their platform notifications menu. When clicked, they will be able to accept or reject the invitation. Once accepted, they will automatically join the workspace with the role they have been granted.

Manage workspace settings

Last but not least, workspace admins can change their settings. Currently, workspace settings have one option which is Require 2FA to access the workspace, where it could be turned on or off. In case it's turned on, all workspace users and invitees are required to enable 2FA for their accounts in order to join the workspace.

Features & Improvements

Implemented shared workspace and user roles
Added “Connected at” filter to advanced filters for endpoints
Added the representation of endpoint service state changes to Audit log
Implemented agent_internal_subnet range changed from 10.0.0.0 to 100.64.0.0
Updated the default date for newly created Agent tokens is be set to 60 days
Implemented agent connections worker service
Improved calendar dropdown closing behavior

Bug Fixes

Applied 2FA usability fixes
Fixed Connection status representation in Analytics
Fixed non-working quick search after custom filter interactions
Fixed resetting “Connected at” filter value after closing advanced filters
Fixed the active route status to represent the correct packet loss value
Applied fixes to allow multiple log line selections
Applied multiple visual fixes for dark mode

Getting Started

Getting Involved

Our community helps us identify the right problems to solve for our users, whether you're an active user of one of our products or just getting started join our community on Discord! We love to foster communication among developers. Also, don't hesitate to send us a message if you have feedback or need assistance. We're happy to help!

Release Notes 22.05.12 - Aesthetic and Functional Updates

Abdelrahman Omran — Thu, 12 May 2022 16:36:47 +0000

As we progress our technology and grow the ecosystem, we listen closely to our community to build tools that matter. If you have any feedback or ideas, let’s talk on Discord.

New Features & Improvements

Added more events to be tracked in the Audit log
New implementation of a notification microservice
Full coverage service coverage with health checks
Rewritten the date selector for global improvements
Migrated to TimescaleDB for more resilient Analytics
Applied multiple visual improvements for the Dark theme
Implemented multiple SDN Path calculation optimizations
Added support to automatically select the platform theme based on the user system settings

Redesigned the "Services" dropdown to appear in a better location in the "Connections" table

Implemented an ability to set up a non-expiring agent token

Fixes

Fixed Audit log date ranges issue
Audit log is now receiving live data
Fixed too restrictive User search in the Audit log
Fixed Audit log results refresh issue after the filters are closed
Fixed service count numbers are stuck after services are disabled
Access tokens do not require a description anymore
Fixed active service reporting on the endpoint level
Fixed IP address cropping in the tooltip

Get Started

Get Involved

Release Notes 22.03.29 - A Colorful Future With Dark Mode, Audit Log for Enterprise Compliance, and much more!

Abdelrahman Omran — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 13:14:50 +0000

We're thrilled to present you with the latest and most advanced release of Syntropy Stack! Our team has been working diligently to bring you some of the most exciting features, like Dark Mode, Audit Logs, and much more! We hope these aesthetic and functional updates will improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

As we progress our technology and grow the ecosystem, we listen closely to our community to build tools that matter. If you have any feedback or ideas, let’s talk on Discord.

New Features

Implemented the ability to download a token as a .txt file
Plugged in more services to our health check monitoring
Extension of Agent Service & SDN Agent status reporting
Set up an SDN Agent Service to maintain the growing network of relay nodes

Dark Mode

One of the most requested features is finally here: Dark mode! Creating a dark mode version for Syntropy Stack was a huge endeavor as our teams had to carefully design and craft for every component and screen. As a result, we created a more balanced color scheme and modernized the look and feel of the platform overall. This feature is available right now, and you can enable it through your account setting.

Audit Log

The audit log is also here, where you can track what happened on your network connections over time. This is a significant milestone as we implement more enterprise features for compliance and security purposes. The audit log is a centralized stream of all system and user activities within your Syntropy Stack account. Most importantly, the log contains entries when an action is taken and what parameters have changed. This is to help you with security and compliance at your organization to control and monitor your network and account activity. This feature is available right now, and you can access it here.

Improvements

Improved Connection service representation
Improved the performance of the analytics infrastructure
Applied multiple improvements to the React components
Updated the Network Graph library for better performance
Improved the performance and UX of the Datepicker component
Connection status modal now refreshes to present the latest connection data

Improved Datepicker

We updated the date picker for better usability.

Bug Fixes

Fixed some advanced filter issues
Fixed endpoint deletion process that left uncleared properties
Fixed the endpoint status to be correctly refreshed in the boards
You won’t be able to create an agent token with an invalid date anymore
Fixed the Kubernetes services to be correctly identified and displayed
Fixed an issue with agent tokens that are unavailable for deletion
Fixed default date range selection in the Analytics date picker
Fixed endpoint duplication issue when assigning new tags
Fixed the service counter display

Getting Started

Getting Involved

Release Notes 22.01.20 - More Stability and Performance Improvements

Abdelrahman Omran — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 16:32:41 +0000

We're excited to present you with the latest release of Syntropy Stack. Our team has been working on many stability and performance improvements to improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

As we progress our technology and grow the ecosystem, we listen closely to our community to build tools that matter. If you have any feedback or ideas, let’s talk on Discord.

Improvements

Analytics batch data write.
Increased the active area of an annotation line.
Implemented analytics data insertion to database queue.
Implemented multiple health checks across the platform.
Analytics annotations aggregation algorithm improvements.

Bug Fixes

Fixed search by endpoint IP.
Added validation for Threshold inputs.
Fixed Connections table auto-updating.
Fixed date picker issue after filter reset.
Fixed agent token table "Notes" column.
Fixed analytics to display data according to timezones.
Added prevention while selecting a date in the future in the date picker.
Fixed last date point being partially hidden in analytics latency and loss charts
Other minor bug fixes & visual improvements.

Get Started

Get Involved

Release Notes 12.28 - SDN Reroute Threshold, Analytics Annotations, and Searchability

Abdelrahman Omran — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 13:26:08 +0000

We're excited to present you with the latest release of Syntropy Stack. Our team has been tailoring the product, adding new features, improving existing ones, and fixing issues. We hope these aesthetic and functional changes will improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

We implemented the ability to control SDN Reroute Threshold, improved analytics annotations for SDN reroute events and added search functionality for the connection's source and destination.

As we progress our technology and grow the ecosystem, we listen closely to our community to build tools that matter. If you have any feedback or ideas, Discord.

New Features

Implemented SDN Re-Routing Latency Thresholds

When the SDN feature is enabled on the account, you can either use the default recommendations or customize thresholds according to your business needs. You can customize routing decisions based on the absolute improvement threshold and improvement ratio values. Let's take an example:

Assume the threshold values as follows: Latency Difference = 50 AND Latency Ratio = 25.
That means the SND will reroute the connection only if there's 50ms or more improvement between the two relays, AND that difference represents 25% improvement.

Based on the above values, here are a couple of scenarios to clarify:

Scenario #1: if PUBLIC Internet latency is 200ms, and SDN1 relay latency is 150ms, then the connection will re-route to SDN1 from PUBLIC since the difference is 50ms, and the ratio is 25% as well.
Scenario #2: if PUBLIC Internet latency is 250ms, and SDN1 relay latency is 200ms, then the connection will NOT reroute to SDN1 from PUBLIC. Although the difference is 50ms, the ratio is only 20%, which doesn't match the second criteria.

Added a Connection ID Filter

We added more filters to filter connections by ID, IP, or name.

Added a Search to Analytics Source & Destination dropdowns

Inside the analytics page, you can find the connection source and destination instances, where you can now search both dropdowns.

Improvements to the Analytics SDN Reroute Annotations display

We announced the SDN re-route event annotations in the analytics graph before, to refresh our memory let's see the following snapshot:

And now we improved these annotations to display how many reroute events happened at a given time, which is helpful when viewing a long timeline with multiple events.

Improvements

Agent service optimizations
Logging infrastructure changes
SDN route calculation improvements
Added health check endpoints to establish more reliability in our services

Fixes

Fixes to Analytics filters & graphs
Fixes to log severity display
Other minor fixes

Get Started

Get Involved

Our community helps us identify the right problems to solve for our users, whether you're an active user of one of our products or just getting started (join our community on Discord](https://discord.gg/UYDyHwk5gN)! We love to foster communication among developers. Also, don't hesitate to send us a message if you have feedback or need assistance. We're happy to help!

Release Notes 12.06 - Stability Improvements and open-source Syntropy Agent

Abdelrahman Omran — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 16:28:15 +0000

We're happy to present you with the latest release of Syntropy Stack. Our team worked hard to improve stability at all levels, for a more solid product. We're also thrilled to announce open sourcing Syntropy Agent, yay! We hope these backend improvements and updates will improve your Syntropy Stack experience today.

As we progress our technology and grow the ecosystem, we listen closely to our community to build tools that matter. If you have any feedback or ideas, let’s talk on Discord.

Syntropy Stack Stability Improvements

The key deliverables in this update include but are not limited to:

Analytics annotation aggregation improvements.
SDN path recalculation & workflow improvements.
General cleanup & bug fixes.

Improvements

Dynamic resolution for analytics results.
Implemented the annotation aggregation.
Updated the SDN part recalculation flows.
Removed workers logic from agents service.
Updated the Connection Status Box when no info.
Improved the advanced filters component to show selected only toggle and separate search input from selection count.
Implemented the ability to select a particular section of a graph to zoom in

Fixes

Fixed port matching.
Fixed custom filter issues in Firefox 94.0.
Fixed custom filters to accept capital letters.
Fixed the message when the tables are empty.
Fixed table pagination occasionally returns errors.
Fixed detailed connection analytics that returns reversed direction analytics
Fixed endpoints checkbox that was kept active even if no endpoints were selected.

Syntropy Agent is now Opensource

We love open-source, and as part of our commitment to our community, we would like to remind you that the new Syntropy Golang Agent is now open-source, and you can find it publicly on GitHub. Feel free to check it out, and play with it!

In case you missed it, we shared our thoughts on the Syntropy Agent Golang Refactor last month, and now it's time to close the circle by open-sourcing it for the public.

To refresh our minds, here are the top highlights:

The agent is backward compatible, and all environment variables are still the same.
The agent is a single go binary, it’s easy to deploy in a non-docker environment.
It significantly reduced resource usage and improved overall speed.
ARM build is coming soon. Yay!

If you like the new updates and improvements, we look forward to hearing your feedback on Twitter or Discord.

Get Started

Get Involved

Our community helps us identify the right problems to solve for our users. Whether you’re an active user of one of our products or just getting started, (join our community on Discord! We love to foster communication among developers. Also, don’t hesitate to send us a message if you have feedback or need assistance. We're happy to help!

Release Notes: 11.18 - Usability Updates, Reworked Agent Service, and Other Improvements

Abdelrahman Omran — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 11:11:09 +0000

As we progress our technology and grow the ecosystem, we listen closely to our community to integrate the tools and building blocks that matter. If you have any feedback or ideas, let's talk on Discord.

Syntropy Stack

New Features

Agent Service Scalability & Stability Improvements

Thanks to our developer community, we received valuable feedback, which enabled us to rework the Agent Service and improve its scalability and stability. As it is one of the critical technical components in the Syntropy collection of tools and libraries, we are now significantly more confident about its robustness in small or large-scale network deployments.

Improvements

SDN Usability Improvements

There are now a couple of new UI updates to improve the usability of the upcoming Syntropy SDN feature.

We implemented an active checkmark displaying which of the paths is being used at a specific time.

We implemented SDN Route change annotations in the Analytics & Latency Graph.

We improved the readability & bandwidth representation in the Analytics section.

Although these are minor updates, we will continue making similar improvements and optimizing the interface for the best user experience.

Other Improvements

Improved the readability & bandwidth representation in the Analytics section.
Shortened the time required to declare an error in the connection.
Agent Service scalability & stability improvements.

Fixes

Fixed endpoint filtering issues.
Fixed analytics graphs appearing 'squeezed' on loading.
Fixed the connection status direction showing incorrectly.
It is no longer possible to create empty tags via Agent token creation section.
Fixed missing platform agent logs in Platform UI.
Fixed issues with agent token table sorting.
Various minor bug fixes.

Windows Application

We want to remind you that the Syntropy Windows Application beta has just ended, and we made the first production release available to download.

There are no significant visual updates compared to the Beta, but what lies under the hood has been significantly reworked and updated. We took care of minor things, such as revamping our installer to be more up-to-date with the current Windows 11 developments. However, most of the updates are concerned with enhancing the core functionality. First, we deployed many bug fixes that became apparent throughout Beta releases and optimized the code back and forth. Most notably, the production version of Syntropy Windows Application is now primed to support Syntropy SDN Routing (not yet implemented into Syntropy Stack), which automatically deploys private alternative paths for your connection and effectively improves the connection performance.

Get Started

Get started with Syntropy Stack with our three minute quick start video, or follow the documentation for more details. Use Syntropy Stack to streamline your container and multi-cloud deployments and automate network orchestration.

Get Involved

Our community helps us identify the right problems to solve for our users. Join our community on Discord if you are an active user of one of our products or just getting started! We love to foster communication among developers. Also, don't hesitate to send us a message if you have feedback or need assistance. We're happy to help!