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Legacy Collector End of Life Notification

In order to best serve our Sentinel™ customers by delivering a high-performance, efficient, and flexible solution, Novell is phasing out the legacy Collector language for the Novell Sentinel product line (including Novell Sentinel, Novell Sentinel Rapid Deployment, Novell Sentinel Log Manager, and Novell Identity Audit). For a description of how to determine if a Collector is a legacy Collector, please consult the quick guide at the end of this message.

The first phase of the phase-out process was the introduction of the Javascript Collector framework in August 2007. The Javascript language and framework is significantly more powerful and flexible than the legacy Collector framework. Javascript Collectors allow for easy handling of multi-line record formats and multi-byte characters, more powerful and extensible string parsing, support for third party libraries, and significantly higher event rates.

In the second phase, Collector Managers that are upgraded from an earlier version will continue to run legacy Collectors. However, new Collector Manager installations will not include the components to run legacy Collectors. This change will take effect when you upgrade to Sentinel Log Manager 1.2 (tentative release date in late January 2011) or Sentinel RD 6.1.2 (tentative release date in late February 2011).

In the third phase, the components that run legacy Collectors will be disabled or removed. Only Javascript Collectors will be supported. This change will take effect when you upgrade to Sentinel 7 (tentative release date in Summer 2011) or Sentinel Log Manager 1.3 (release date TBD).

Detailed Scenarios

Changes to the components that run legacy Collectors will only take place when you upgrade. See below for detailed scenarios.

If you are currently running legacy Collectors on Sentinel:

  • When you upgrade the Sentinel system to any 6.x version, the system will still run legacy Collectors.
  • When you upgrade the Sentinel system to Sentinel 7.0, the system will not run legacy Collectors. It will only run Javascript Collectors.

If you are currently running legacy Collectors on Sentinel Rapid Deployment (RD):

  • When you upgrade the Sentinel RD system to version 6.1.2:
    • Upgraded Collector Managers will still run legacy Collectors.
    • Newly installed Collectors Managers will not run legacy Collectors.
  • When you upgrade the Sentinel RD system to Sentinel 7.0, the Collector Managers will not run legacy Collectors. It will only run Javascript Collectors.

If you are currently running legacy Collectors on Sentinel Log Manager:

  • When you upgrade the Sentinel Log Manager system to version 1.2:
    • Upgraded Collector Managers will still run legacy Collectors.
    • Newly installed Collectors Managers will not run legacy Collectors.
  • When you upgrade Sentinel Log Manager to version 1.3, the system will not run legacy Collectors. It will only run Javascript Collectors.

You can get more information about the support life cycles of Sentinel products at Novell Support.

Writing Javascript Collectors

If you have legacy Collectors that need to be rewritten in Javascript, Novell provides a comprehensive, Eclipse-based software development kit (SDK) that will help you migrate legacy Collectors to Javascript Collectors. This SDK can be accessed from the Sentinel developer portal. A guide for migrating a legacy Collector to the Javascript framework will be made available soon on this site as well.

If your organization requires additional assistance, Novell and our trusted Partners offer customized IT Consulting services in order to ease your transition to the Javascript Collector framework. Our experienced staff can help you to write Javascript Collectors or provide staff augmentation and expertise. If you need assistance with moving to the Javascript Collector framework, please contact a Novell Services Executive:

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Novell support or your Novell sales representative.

How To Identify Legacy Collectors

The legacy Collector language was introduced in the first version of Sentinel to support simple parsing of inbound event data. As event sources became more complex and started to generate multi-byte data, XML, and other formats, the legacy language was not able to meet the requirements for parsing this data. Novell introduced the Javascript framework in Sentinel 6.0 in order to provide support for modern event sources.

All Collectors developed using the legacy Collector Builder standalone application are written in the legacy language. By contrast, all of the Collectors shipped with recent Sentinel products, available for download on the Sentinel Plug-in download page or written using the Novell Plug-in SDK are written in Javascript.

If you are still not certain whether your Collectors are written in the legacy language, you can examine the files in the plug-ins. All Sentinel Collectors come as standard ZIP files, which contain the individual code, data, and meta-data that make up the Collector plug-in. You can easily tell whether a Collector is written in the legacy language by unzipping the component and checking for the presence of *.LKP files - newer Collectors will have *.js files instead. Note: If you do not have stored copies of your production Collectors available, you can export plug-ins from the Event Source Management framework by right-clicking on the component tree you wish to export and selecting "Export Configuration."

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