Updated on: 05 September, 2019 VMware Pulse IoT Center | Version 2.0.0 | On-Premise GA Release

What's in the Release Notes

The release notes cover the following topics:

• About VMware Pulse IoT Center
• Gateways Certified for Use
• Before You Begin
• Known Issues

About VMware Pulse IoT Center

VMware Pulse IoT Center is a secure, enterprise-grade, edge infrastructure and IoT device management solution that provides visibility and control over all IoT use cases. It helps companies to onboard, configure, monitor, manage and secure IoT devices and infrastructure. The solution enables IT and Operational Technology (OT) to simplify device management and operationalize IoT use cases quickly by reducing the complexity of managing all the heterogeneous edge and IoT systems in one place.

VMware Pulse IoT Center Version 2.0 includes the following new features and capabilities by their feature category:

Onboard

• Onboard certified gateways and connected devices securely to the Service Offering through a low-touch enrollment process
• Configure gateways, connectivity to gateways, and application/containers on gateways
• Setup of device properties and metrics through device template
• Define metrics collection frequency and batch size

Monitor and Troubleshoot IoT Infrastructure

• Set up alert definition and notification through email or REST API
• Monitor device health and detect abnormalities
• Troubleshoot through system log and audit log 
• Act by sending supported commands to devices 

Manage IoT Infrastructure

• Enable policy driven over-the-air software lifecycle management 
• Manage the software and security patch update approval process
• View alerts, metrics trends, and granular status of software update execution on the dashboard
• Visualize the representation of the parent-child topology 
• Manage certified heterogeneous devices and gateways with different hardware, operating systems, and communication protocols

Interface

• Role-based user access according to organizations and use cases.

Gateways Certified for Use

The VMware Compatibility Guide lists the Gateways and Edge Systems that are certified for use with VMware Pulse IoT Center:

• Edge Gateways: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/vcl/edgeiot.php
• Embedded Systems: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/vcl/embeddediot.php

Before You Begin

Before you begin using VMware Pulse IoT Center, ensure that you meet the following requirements:

Setup

• Create roles for various permissions that are suited to your organization. The following roles are created by default, and can be used as a reference:
  • Default Administrator
  • Monitoring Administrator
  • Campaign Administrator
  • Gateway Administrator
• Ensure that the Gateways and Edge Systems are certified for use with VMware Pulse IoT Center.
• Install the IoTC Agent package on your gateways: Perform the following steps:
  1. Log in to the VMware Pulse IoT Center UI.
  2. From the top right of the home page, click the settings icon and click Downloads.
  3. Download the IoTC Agent tarball Pulse Agent (x86_64),  Pulse Agent (arm), or Pulse Agent (aarch64) to your local system.
  4. Copy the IoTC Agent tarball to the gateway file system by using SSH.
  5. Extract the IoTC Agent tarball on the gateway.
  6. Run install.sh.
• Create a device template using VMware Pulse IoT Center to enroll gateways or thing devices.

Technical Configuration and Code Integration

• Users with the Campaign Administrator or Package Administrator role can create campaign packages using the Package Management CLI tool.
• The Package Management CLI tool is available for download from VMware Pulse IoT Center > Downloads section.
• The Package Management CLI tool creates campaign packages in the VMware Pulse IoT Center recommended iotcp format.
• Use the DefaultClient file as a binary or code to perform the following operations from the gateway. The DefaultClient file is available at: /opt/vmware/iotc-agent/bin:
  • Gateway and Thing Enrollment/Unenrollment
  • Custom Metrics Ingestion
  • Edit or Read Properties on the VMware Pulse IoT Center Server
  • Add Devices
• Additionally, the VMware Pulse IoTC Agent has a DefaultClient daemon that collects device metrics such as CPU, Memory, and Disk Usage from the gateway and sends them to the VMware Pulse IoT Center server.
• These metrics are called Default Metrics and are added automatically while creating the gateway templates.
• While creating a gateway template, ensure that you do not remove or edit the CPU-Usage, Memory-Usage, and Disk-Usage metrics that are available in the template by default.

Known Issues

The following known issues will be fixed in the upcoming releases.

• Device Template field is empty when you click the distribution list link in the Campaign Details page.

  On a Firefox browser for Windows, the Device Template field is empty when you click the distribution list link in the Campaign Details page.

• Number formats are not localized on the UI.

  The number format remains the same across the UI.

• The number format does not change according to the user's locale when creating a device template.

  The number format under Metrics does not change according to the user's locale when creating a device template.

• GRPC connection does not work in a public environment.

  The server-side update on a device such as properties is communicated through gRPC instantly to the gateway. Currently, gRPC-based communication does not work on public instances of VMware Pulse IoT Center. However, the server changes do get propagated to the gateway device since the gateway is configured to poll the server every 5 minutes.

• Firefox Browser Issue: The Severity section of Alert Definitions has spacing issues.

  Spacing in the Severity section of Alert Definitions is not consistent.

• Campaign Retry issue in sub-organizations

  When you press Retry for a campaign that is in the "Download Failed" state, the devices in the campaign are temporarily removed and added back after 30 minutes.

  Workaround: Stop and restart the campaign for the devices to be added immediately.

• Confirm Password field missing in the First Organization page when setting up a server node.

  In the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administration console, the Confirm Password field is missing in the First Organization page when you set up a server node.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• Incorrect field name in the Replace Certificate wizard.

  In the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administration console, the Select Certificate step of the Replace Certificate wizard for a Load Balancer node displays an incorrect field name. Instead of Host Name, the field name must be Load Balancer Host Name. The corresponding tool tip message also displays the incorrect name.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• Unable to delete comma-separated nodes in the Load Balancer UI of the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administrator console.

  After adding the IP addresses of the three nodes separated by commas, you cannot delete them.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• System notification creation date is displayed incorrectly. 

  When you create a system notification in the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administration console,the notification creation date and time is taking start date and time instead of current date and time.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• In the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administration UI, after the license expires, the license expiry message is not displayed.

  After the license expires, the nodes will disable the  API access as expected, but license expiry message is not displayed in the UI.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• The system notification created in the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administration console does not contain Start and End dates.

  We can create the System Notifications by just selecting the Start and End dates but the created notification does not contain Start/End Dates.

  The issue will be fixed in the next release.

• When a custom metric data greater than 32 bytes is passed to VMware Pulse IoT Center, the input string is truncated. 

  The custom metric data in VMware Pulse IoT Center UI is configured as a STRING. For the STRING metric type, the maximum length supported must be at least 64 bytes in order to support custom sensors/metrics.

  The issue will be fixed in the next release. 

• Package management usability issue

  The package management sample YML file package-spec.yml states that you can specify the target architecture of the operating system, and if you do not specify the target architecture, the package-spec.yml tries to use the system's architecture first and will default to noarch if it is not able to determine the architecture. This behavior is also expected for the operating system, where the default is noos.

  However, when you run the package-spec.yml with noos, an error message is displayed.

   

  The scripts must be defaulted to bash to run successfully.

• VMware Pulse IoT Administration UI fails to list services error when you start the services for the first time.

  When you restart VMware Pulse IoT Administration UI several times during the service startup, the following error is displayed:
  "Failed to list services".

  The issue will be fixed in the next release.

• In VMware Pulse IoT Center > Alerts > Alerts History tab, the username is not entirely visible when the alert state is ACK.

   

  If the current state of the alert is ACK, the acknowledged username and label are not visible entirely for the last trigger event in the history.

   

• Executing multiple commands before the previous command moves to EXECUTED state skips the pending command execution.

  The following steps reproduce this issue:

  1. Send the create photon1 container command. 

  2. Before the previous command moves to EXECUTED state, send another command create photon2 container. 

  Both the commands stay in the PENDING state. 

  After you send a command, you must wait for its status to change from PENDING to the EXECUTED state before sending another command.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• In the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administration Notification page, when you search a notification which is present in the second page, the notification is not displayed.

  When you navigate to the Notification page and search for a notification which is on the second page, the notification is not displayed in the search result. It displays only if we navigate to the second page.

   

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• Client command values in the device template accept only a string as the default argument type.

  When adding a client command, the Arguments window provides only the Name and Value field options. Type is not enabled in the UI. By default, all the values are considered as a string.

   

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• In the VMware Pulse IoT Center > Alerts Definitions page, the details view only displays ten templates.

  When you create an alert definition with more than 10 device templates, the Details page displays only 10 templates with additional commas.

• There is no change when you remove a template or device ID from an alert definition.

  The existing alerts triggered on the template or device ID are not canceled.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• Multiple user sessions logout issue.

  Log in to the VMware Pulse IoT Center console from multiple browser windows. If you log out of one session, the system logs you out of all the other sessions.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• Wrong precision value for the metric type "double"

  If you send a metric value 50.0101 for the metric type double, the VMware Pulse IoTC Agent sends an incorrect value as 50.010101318359375.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• User package must not be allowed to disconnect the Edge gateway's DCC-comms connectivity.

  The sample temperature_sensor script disconnects DCC-comms on exception and subsequently all VMware Pulse IoTC Agent to VMware Pulse IoT Center communication is broken.

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• Unable to create a user with same name across multiple tenants.

  If you create users with the same user name under different organizations at the time of login, the first username is picked up and the other users with the same username cannot log in the system.

• SDK API and DefaultClient binary return incorrect response.

  The SDK API and the DefaultClient binary return incorrect response if the number of connected devices for the gateway is more than 9.

• Metric values are not displaying details while hovering the mouse on a graph for a single data point.

  In the VMware Pulse IoT Center UI, when you hover the mouse on a graph for a single data point, metric values are not displaying its details. When there are more than one data points, the details are displayed when you hover the mouse. 

   

• Unable to create an offline alert definition on a template having no metrics.

  If there are no metrics defined, you cannot create an offline alert definition. 

• In the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administration UI, you cannot add a new license if you delete an existing one.

  When we have more than one license, deleting the last added license causes the License page to go blank. You cannot add the license again from the VMware Pulse IoT Center Administration UI.

  If we need to delete the last added license when we have more than one license, delete all the previously added licenses from the top. That is, delete the licenses from the top to the bottom and add them again.

• When creating a system notification, the start time must be lesser than the end time.

  Currently, the system allows you to create a system notification with an end time that has occurred in the past. 

  This issue will be fixed in the next release.

• Keys selected for the email subject, body, or rest payload template while creating a notification definition are inserted at the end of the template.

  When creating a notification definition for the email subject/body/rest payload template, the key selected from the drop-down menu are inserted at the end of the template instead of the point where the cursor is present.

  Copy and paste the keys at the location where you want to add them.