Kitewheel November 2018 Release Notes

Following on from the work in the October Release where we improved communication with and control of the engine we have focussed on the following areas in this release: 

• Visual Testing - making this more reliable and easier to use
• Engine Listener Balancing - ensuring that processing of requests happens evenly across the engines

Visual Testing 

Visual testing is an important part of the graph development cycle in the Kitewheel Hub. We had been tracking several issues with visual testing and had seen a number of potential problems: 

• The graph may show the pulsating listener icon but may not show the "Running" confirmation in the testing console
• The graph may under report the number of events - in some cases not showing any events at all

These issues were caused by a lack of robust communications between the browser and the Kitewheel Hub which meant that a single missed piece of communication could result in the issues above. Essentially this all came down to timing. In order to resolve this we have re-engineered the communication process so that the client will poll a distinct service to get the visual testing results. We believe that this has eradicated the vast majority of visual testing problems. 

Not content with that set of fixes we have also made some changes to the visual display of the visual testing information to make life easier for all Kitewheel configurers. 

Testing Console Transaction Expansion 

The Testing Console will automatically expand the most recent test run and fold up the previous finished runs. This allows you to automatically see the most recent run and makes it easier to navigate to the information that you need to see if your test was successful.

Transaction Highlighting

The transaction expand arrow and the Transaction Number text will now all highlight to make it easier to see which transaction is being shown and the path that transaction took will now be highlighted in yellow rather than blue. This makes it easier to follow the path of the transaction. 

Engine Listeners

Over the last two releases we have put in some effort to get more efficient use of the hardware used for the Kitewheel Engine stack. There are two types of process which run on the engine - the listeners and the job processors. These will be familiar to you from the Kitewheel graph interface. The number of listeners and the amount of work that each listener does can affect the performance of an engine. Prior to this work it was possible for a number of listeners to end up on a single engine processor which caused the stack to become unbalanced. Kitewheel now actively manages the listeners and where possible creates an even balance of listeners across the engine stack. 

This is a small step towards a re-architecture of the Kitewheel engine which will have performance and stability improvements in future releases. Most of these changes will be invisible to the user but should result in faster graph execution times and lower costs to service the same number of graphs. 

Bug Fixes

A number of other bugs were fixed in this release: 

• [KIT-1838] - Managed graph schema exposed to end user - the schema for managed graphs is no longer visible
• [KIT-2035] - Flask routes freezing could cause engine failure 
• [KIT-2071] - Org dropdown - the organisation drop down available to OEM users had a display issue that has now been fixed