User Guide

Single Node Upgrade from 4.24 to 4.25

This guide will lead you through the steps specific for upgrading from a NetEye Single Node installation from version 4.24 to 4.25. You must have successfully completed the Update Procedure before attempting to start the upgrade procedure.

Warning

Remember that you must upgrade sequentially without skipping versions, therefore an upgrade to 4.24 is possible only from 4.23; for example, if you have version 4.21, you must first upgrade to the 4.22, then 4.23, and so on.

Before starting an upgrade, you should very carefully read the latest release notes on NetEye’s blog and check the feature changes and deprecations specific to the version being upgraded. You should check also the whole section Breaking Changes below.

The remainder of this section is organised as follows. Section Breaking Changes introduces substantial changes that users must be aware of before starting the upgrade procedure and may require to carry out some tasks before starting the upgrade; section NetEye Single Node Upgrade Procedure presents the actual procedure, and finally section Additional Tasks shows which tasks must be executed after the upgrade procedure has been successfully executed.

Breaking Changes

NetEye Setup

Hostname Validation

From NetEye 4.25 onwards, hostname will be validated with follow specifications during neteye_secure_install. Existing NetEye installations with hostname that are not compliant with these specifications will only get a warning during neteye_secure_install, but do not need to change the hostname:

  • Only letters allowed in the first position

  • Hostname must consist only of letters [A-Za-z] numbers [0-9] hyphens - and dot

  • Hostname must end with a letter [A-Za-z] or a number [0-9]

  • Hostname must not contain two consecutive dots​

  • Hostname must not contain two hyphens in third and fourth position:

    • valid hostname: neteye-test-01, neteye-production, neteye-node1, master, master.lan,

    • invalid hostname: ne–teye, -neteye-, neteye_01, 3neteye, @neteye, neteye-.com, master..lan

Tags and new neteye node tags command

Release 4.24 introduced RHEL 8 as new underlying operating system together with automatic registration and Red Hat Insights.

This means that, if the NetEye Single Node, Cluster, or Satellite has not yet been registered to Red Hat using the neteye node tags set command, the upgrade process will temporarily stop and ask for a few data (Customer ID, contract number, type of installation and deployment, see Section neteye node tags set for more information).

Make sure to have all these data at hand during the upgrade process; if you do not know some or all of these data, please refer to the official channels: sales, consultants, or support portal to receive them.

Elastic Stack

Kibana customization

The 4.25 version of NetEye updates Elastic Stack to version 7.17.4. In order to address a deprecation warning dispatched by Kibana, the update renames a variable in the /neteye/shared/kibana/conf/sysconfig/kibana file. In order to simplify future updates that could involve it, therefore minimising the users’ effort, the file is not set as a config file anymore. This change will generate a /neteye/shared/kibana/conf/sysconfig/kibana.rpmsave file and, in case custom options were present, these must be migrated to the /neteye/shared/kibana/conf/sysconfig/kibana-user-customization file.

More details about the change and how to migrate custom options can be found in Section User Customization.

Elasticsearch Index Templates

From version 4.25, NetEye installs and uses the new Index Templates of Elasticsearch, which configure the settings of the indices generated by El Proxy. These Index Templates are in the new composable index template format, which by design completely override all Legacy Index Templates that match the same indices.

In simple terms, the newly introduced templates match the indices with pattern filebeat-7.17.4-elproxysigned-*. So if you have any custom Legacy Index Template that need to be applied on these indices, you need to migrate them to the new composable index templates. Please refer to the Section Customizing the Composable Index Templates to perform the migration.

Moreover, from NetEye 4.25 onwards in case you need to create additional Index Templates for any Beats agents, you must follow the procedure described in Section Generating Templates for Additional Beats. Not following this procedure will result in El Proxy indices having wrong ILM policies and index mappings.

NetEye Single Node Upgrade Procedure

Recall that if you still did not provide tags for registration to Red Hat and Red Hat Insights, the upgrade process will be stopped to allow you to set them. Refer to Section Breaking Changes for more information.

To perform the upgrade, run from the command line the command:

neteye# (nohup neteye upgrade &) && tail --retry -f nohup.out

All the tasks carried out by the command are listed in section neteye upgrade; a dedicated section provides directions in case the command fails.

Additional Tasks

This section lists the tasks that must be carried out manually, because they are not part of the neteye upgrade command.

In this release, no additional task is required.