The 8.0 release introduces a new menu with improved navigation options and a different organization of its items. The color scheme was updated and unified across all forms and tools to ease identification of common actions. Existing forms and tools have only be modified in details but have retained their familiar operation.

Additional vendor modules have been incorporated and existing updated.

A new REST API based on a TM Forum standard is introduced to handle ServiceOrder requests from an OSS system. This TMF641 API will simplify integrations where NetYCE service-types and command jobs need to be orchestrated to manage standardized network services.

Although the upgrade to version 8 requires a new NetYCE license file, the upgrade from 7.2 to version 8.0 will waive this requirement. Similarly, a new licence file for version 8 can be installed on a 7.2 installation prior to the upgrade. This to simplify the logistics of the upgrade.

As always, the version 8 upgrade can be performed using the front-end (Admin - System - full report) and will require only a few minutes. It is mandatory to upgrade all NetYCE servers sequentially, starting with the database servers.

Version 8.0.0 will feature a significant upgrade of the graphical user interface. Technologies were upgraded from AngularJS to Angular 12, and the layout and the colour scheme has been upgraded to a more modern standard. The functionality of the forms themselves remains unchanged.

The left-hand menu of the graphical user interface (GUI) has been rearranged. Instead of four main categories of 'design', 'build', 'operate' and 'admin', there now are eight categories:

• Inventory: deals with all of the nodes and devices in your system) and node groups
• Design: retains a lot of the items of the previous design category, with client-, site-, node- and service-types, plus ip plans
• Build: contains the blocks you need to build your network environment, such as domains, regions and templates
• Operate: contains all kinds of tools you need for operating your network environment.
• Compliance: contains all compliance functions
• Backups: manage all configuration backups. Formerly named 'NCCM', for Network Configuration and Change Management.
• Reports: manage reports
• Admin: the administration section. Note that the 'Lookup' section has been renamed to 'Settings'

You can now search for menu items using the search bar at the top of the left sidebar using keywords. The shortcut key to move the focus to this field is ctrl+space.

The menu will automatically hide menu-items when the operator has insufficient privileges to access the tool in question.

The top bar now contains a list with the five pages you last visited.

The server buttons have been converted to a dropdown and moved to the right part of the screen

The menu can be collapsed to a narrow bar. Hovering over this bar will momentarily expand the menu.

Additional vendor modules have been added, bringing up the total to 28 product families spanning 17 vendors. The latest additions are:

• Alcatel Timos
• Cisco ACI
• Aruba MM
• Corvil CNE
• Arista EOS
• Falcon MroTek

The Cisco ACI and Corvil CNE offer limited functionality as their intended use at this time is primarily Backup and Compliance.

The NetYCE Service Order API provides a standardized mechanism for managing Service Order, a type of order which can be used to place an order from a Customer Order management system to the NetYCE Service Orchestration and Infrastructure Provisioning system. The NetYCE ServiceOrder API is a subset of the TMF641 ServiceOrder specification.

A service order will describe a list of service order items. A service order item references an action (create, change, terminate) on an existing or new service. In the current NetYCE implementation each ServiceOrder is allowed to contain only a single ServiceOrderItem. The ServiceOrderItem references a Service that contains a list of Characteristics relevant to the service commissioning.

A detailed description of the API can be found at https://app.swaggerhub.com/apis/NetYCE/api-service_ordering/4.1.0

Zero-touch-provisioning (ZTP) support can be realized using the optionally available DHCP server and the events it creates. As ZTP requires some network configuration support and some well-documented vendor behaviour, the implementation requires some joint design and development by NetYCE.

The colours for the various severity levels for compliance have been standardised. They are still customisable, but if you customised them in the past these changes will be overwritten.

A number of grids now have their search options turned on automatically, so you don't have to expicitly enablethe 'search'function. These include templates, relations, regions, domains, scenarios, compliance policies, logs and many more.

Various forms have their layout modified to be more flexible for various screen widths

The 'Templates' form now allows the operator to switch between Client-types directly instead of re-selecting a client using the 'Inventory' form.

The Safari browser is now fully supported

When a configuration fails to be successfully uploaded to the NetYCE server using the designated transfer protocol, the fallback method of screen scraping will be used for some vendors instead. This method will use a basic 'show configuration' type of command which will then be read from the terminal. This method is now available for Checkpoint, Cisco Nexus, Cisco ACI, Juniper and Palo Alto. Additional vendor support will be forthcoming.

Vendor supported transfer protocols

In the System settings, the tweak 'Commit_pending_policy' has been added: When Num_value set to 1, commit based vendors will issue commit commands during command jobs: in case this is not desired, set the Num_value to 0. Only commit based vendors support this option, which are currently: Juniper, Palo Alto, Huawei CE and Cisco XR. The various tweaks can be configured using the 'Settings' page under 'Admin - Setup'.

Various vendor modules now support 25, 40 and 100 gigabit ethernet interfaces

NetYCE uses functional users to login to the devices. Its credentials are defined in the management Domain of the device. However, when the local policies do not allow for the use of these functional users or such user accounts are not unavailable, an alternative method is required.

For all scenario commands that establish sessions with a device, the option '-u <operator>' was added to prepend the list of (domain) credentials. This permits using any NetYCE account to be used as primary login credentials. The assigned NetYCE password of this operator account will be used as default but can be overridden by a designated password for the network devices using the 'Device-password' field that was added to the user forms.

The existing Infoblox integration for DNS manipulation in scenarios was extended to support Infoblox extended attributes

• Cisco_IOS vendor module will now report job as aborted when not allowed to “enable”
• Huawei_CE now also supports telnet
• Port_type value of 25g ports for HP_C7 vendor has been renamed from Twentyfive-GigabitEthernet to Twenty-FiveGigE
• Huawei_CE will now only issue a commit command in case changes have been made to the configuration (except when the Commit_pending_policy tweak says otherwise)
• Rename Port_type value for Huawei_S from 'XgigabitEthernet' to '10GE' and also added 25GE, 40GE and 100GE entries
• Linux server login fails to detect bash/sh prompt
• Checkpoint vendor module now keeps better track regarding if we login initially in clish or expert shell and act accordingly
• Cisco_IOS vendor module will now report job as aborted when not allowed to “enable”

• The Max_retries value for polling groups can now be set to 0, which means that nodes will be immediately disabled when an nccm backup poll fails.
• NCCM / Backups now shows the reason why a poll has failed in the Comment field in the frontend
• Inconsistent reported number of nodes per policy in the Compliance Dashboard was corrected
• Nodes listed as YCE and CMDB devices can be polled and compliance tested twice when listed under different client/site
• The nccmd daemon now doesn't fail after it tries to execute a command rule with a command that is invalid
• Compliance reports when exported to csv had misaligned columns. This is fixed now.

• The command replies grid now supports pagination
• Main inventory grids still find CMDB entries on search on active CMDB filtering (tweak Filter_CMDB_nodes)
• The search on the main build page now also return sites without nodes
• Action log has too many nccm and compliance entries
• Whenever you edited your own password in the user- or profile-form, the website would crash due to out-of-date session cookies. You now automatically are logged out when you change your own password, in order to refresh them
• Some password fields in the domain forms were autocompleted from your browser. This is now fixed.
• Web browsers have implemented some stricter rules on cookie domains over the past few years. They caused login issues in certain cases, but these have been fixed.

• The command replies grid now supports pagination
• Main inventory grids still find CMDB entries on search on active CMDB filtering (tweak Filter_CMDB_nodes)
• The search on the main build page now also return sites without nodes
• Action log has too many nccm and compliance entries
• Whenever you edited your own password in the user- or profile-form, the website would crash due to out-of-date session cookies. You now automatically are logged out when you change your own password, in order to refresh them
• Some password fields in the domain forms were autocompleted from your browser. This is now fixed.
• Web browsers have implemented some stricter rules on cookie domains over the past few years. They caused login issues in certain cases, but these have been fixed.