Flow Enterprise Server release 2021.1.1

This information is specific to the 2021.1.1 Flow Enterprise Server release.

Important notes

There are several infrastructure and system changes in the Kubernetes control plane (opens in new tab), which make the Flow Enterprise Server 2021.1.1 installation different from previous releases. Some of the changes include:

• The Kubernetes runtime environment moved from Docker to Containerd. This provides more flexibility and additional benefits to underlying components of Flow Enterprise Server that require additional functions and features.
• The Flow application includes new features and improvements which require larger host/server instances for performance and stability. The CPU, memory, storage, and number of node requirements have been increased. Check out the Flow Enterprise Server 2021.1.1 system requirements for more information.
• In order to ensure stability of Flow, Pluralsight recommends that customers implement a three-node cluster to provide protection from node failure, disk failure, and volume corruption.
• Flow Enterprise Server is moving to require a single, raw block device for Ceph storage usage on every node in the cluster. This is a requirement for new installations, and is optional for upgrades in the 2021.1.1 release. Future versions of Flow Enterprise Server will require raw block devices for upgrades.

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Features and major changes

Reports

• The former Retrospective report is now named Trends. No other changes to the report were made.
• The team and user filters have been updated to make it easier to find the teams and users you care about in your reports.
• If you have a group/sub-group hierarchy, you can set up a repo template to let you see commits when you click through to your Git host.

User management

• View your historical team imports from the Team import history page. Access team imports from the Teams page by clicking Import teams. On this page, see the last 90 days of team imports, download the results of CSV team imports, and view results of your CSV upload. Learn more about bulk importing teams.
• When new Flow plans are created, four default roles will be created with permissions and view rights already filled out to help you set permissions for your teams. Keep these roles and permissions, modify them, or create your own. The default roles are: Admin, Executive, Team lead, and Team member. Team member is the default assigned role.
• Hide users in bulk, so you can exclude many users at once from metrics and hide them from your user list. Hidden users helps you manage users, especially if you have added open source libraries which are bringing in a lot of users or bots outside your organization.
• The Manage Integrations administrative permission now has three different access levels to help you delegate integration management. When giving this permission to a user or role, choose to give them one of three access levels: View, manage, and delete; View and manage; or View only. All users and roles that previously had the Manage Integrations permission will automatically receive View, manage, and delete access.

Repo management

• There's more detailed error information when a repo isn't processing. See this information on the Repo page or when using the Repos API.

Email reporting

• Flow uses text-based email reports to increase stability and performance. They will have the same information as our current email reports, but with an updated design.

Project reprocessing

• Four new options have been added to the Integrations page: Update all repos, Update all PRs, Update all tickets, and Update background metric. these commands help troubleshoot issues with project processing by triggering a full reprocessing of repos, PRs, tickets, or metric calculations, so we recommend consulting with a member of Support before use, as it could back up queues or result in rate limiting. Learn more about managing integrations.

Advanced logging

• Now you can forward Flow Enterprise logs to an external Splunk or ElasticSearch stack.

Monitoring and alerting

• Monitor disk space on the cluster and prevent data corruption with a controlled shutdown.
• Access the built-in Prometheus and Grafana dashboards.

Infrastructure

• Updated to recent versions of Java (JDK) and Apache Web Server.

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Patch release updates

• 2021.1.1-1: Added a fix for custom certificate trust in Java components.
• 2021.1.1-2: Added a setting in the KOTS admin console to enable or disable the Help menu in the Flow header. The menu is disabled by default.

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Resolved issues and miscellaneous updates

• Abandoned PRs marked as Not Merged instead of Closed
• In situations involving pair programming, coding days in Fundamentals reports not matching Work Log
• Repo filter not properly filtering repos or projects when searching
• Long names not showing up fully on the Snapshot report
• Unable to set targets for individual users
• Unable to unlink user aliases
• Cannot click through to view commits
• Admin alerts email not including some projects
• Unable to view participants in the PR resolution report
• Unable to select the number of projects per page on the PR project page
• Team import was case sensitive, causing duplicate user creation
• Incorrectly blocking projects
• Sort options on the Repo page not functioning correctly
• ADO/TFS auto-import ticket projects not working
• Mislabeling PRs submitted by users excluded from metrics as Excluded PR: Regular Expression