May 25, 2022

Alex Woodie

With the recent release of IBM i 7.5, IBM has added several exciting new features to “New Nav”, the new version of IBM Navigator for i which debuted less than a year ago. Benefits for all IBM i administrators include audit log support, integration with Content Manager OnDemand for i, and Performance Data Investigator updates, among other additions.

IBM released a remake of IBM Navigator for i with last September’s Technology Refresh for 7.3 and 7.4. The company rewrote Navigator from the ground up in Angular, a JavaScript framework for building web and mobile apps, and PrimeNG, a popular component library for Angular.

In addition to being much faster than the old Navigator for i product (also called “Old Nav” or “Heritage Navigator”), the software allows users to work with multiple LPARs simultaneously, which required opening multiple tabs in the old product. The internal use of SQL and REST-based services also marks a technological break from the previous product.

When IBM launched New Nav last year, it thought it had some time to move all the features and capabilities of the Old Nav product. However, since it was discovered earlier this year that Old Nav had a critical and unpatchable security vulnerability in Log4j, IBM has accelerated the pace of delivering new features in New Nav to speed up the arrival of feature parity.

At the top of the list of new features in New Nav is audit log support. You can now view bar charts of the number of audit log entries per day, per week, or in a detailed view. This gives you the ability to quickly see if there are any security trends you should be aware of, such as increasing security breaches, password changes, or deleted objects.

In Day View, New Nav allows users to hover over the graph to see detailed information, including the count type for each security entry and the entry’s full name (as opposed to abbreviations used by IBM, such as AF , PW, CA, etc.), then double-click it to access the detailed view for a specific input type.

IBM now allows you to view QAUDJRN data in New Nav.

Weekly view lets you hover over each chart and view the SQL command used to generate the chart, IBM says. You can also double-click the chart to access the detailed view for that type of entry, it says. Learn more about the QAUDJRN-New Nav integration here.

New Nav also gets its initial support for Content Manager on Demand (CMOD) for i, an IBM i program that allows you to capture, index, store and distribute a large number of business documents, such as reports, checks, statements and invoices. , or even image files like x-rays. The software typically serves as a long-term archive for documents that in the past would have been processed with paper or microfiche.

With this release, IBM offers users the ability to perform several CMOD for i tasks in the New Nav interface, including: defining the storage media to which data can be migrated; define monitors to allow automatic loading of data from directories or output queues; and set policies for data migration to various storage media and data expiration.

IBM supports a list of approximately 10 CMOD for i definitions that can be viewed by an administrator in New Nav (but not modified), including: instances; disk pools; NFS disk pools; cloud storage resources; optical volumes, etc. There are also a handful of CMOD for i functions in development, including several relating to optical volumes, tape volumes, and more. You can learn more about the improvements for yourself here.

New Nav also sees improvements for Performance Data Investigator (PDI), which was previously partially supported. With this release, IBM gives you the ability to open a PDI perspective chart in a new browser tab.

It also provides a new health indicators package that allows you to view perspectives with multiple collections (although this is limited to two collections per query). IBM also updated the perspective path list to make it more user-friendly and gave you the option to launch to search for data from the active job list. There is also a new breadcrumb feature that allows users to safely exit views, which was not easy to do before. You can read more about these improvements here.

On the LDAP front, you can also use New Nav to configure your system to publish certain information (including systems, printers, print shares, user information, and TCP/IP QoS policies) to a directory server, which can either be on the same system or on a different system. The operating system automatically publishes this information to the directory server when you use New Nav to change this information, IBM says.

IBM has also enabled certain NetServer features in New Nav, including the ability to view and configure IBM i NetServer properties (such as general settings, security settings, and WINS configuration); to view status information; and to manage deactivated user credentials, including their activation.

IBM has made several other minor improvements to New Nav, including an upgrade to Angular and PrimeNG, which may change the column layout of some tables. It also updated SMTP properties in New Nav, added dynamic key connections in its VPN support; and added a window that lists all replacement variables that can be used for each type of monitor.

New Nav only works with IBM i 7.3 and higher. Customers of older versions can either continue to use Old Nav while being aware of the security risks, or revert to using green screen controls.

In terms of feature parity with Old Nav, it doesn’t look like we’re there yet. Features like Advanced Job Scheduler, PowerHA, BRMS and AFP form functions that were available in Old Nav are still not available in New Nav.

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