L2024.1 Release Notes - Pre-Release

These release notes are being provided in advance of the release, for your preparation and evaluation of the upcoming version. This version will be released for Cloud Availability shortly.

For a list of release dates and Sisense's end of support schedule, see Sisense Life Cycle.

  • To download the latest Sisense version, or to upgrade to an older version, see that version’s Release Notes and contact your Sisense Customer Success Manager for the version package.

  • To upgrade to this version of Sisense:

    • Read the Release Notes of all the versions following your current version, up to and including the version to which you are upgrading.

    • Run a system backup before upgrading. See Backing up and Restoring Sisense.

    • Follow the upgrade procedure in Upgrading Sisense.

Privacy and Security Information

This release contains several security related updates. We highly recommend upgrading to this latest release to take advantage of any security-related updates and benefit from the Sisense support and warranty. In addition, Sisense strongly recommends regularly testing and auditing your environment after upgrading, and periodically during your subscription term, to ensure all privacy and security settings remain in place.

Customers are responsible for controlling and monitoring your environments and are therefore in the best position to ensure the correct security settings are in place for how you use Sisense products.

Due to the complexity of Sisense products, we strongly suggest that all customers ensure that you understand how all of the privacy and security settings within Sisense work.

If you use Sisense to store/process sensitive data, it is your responsibility to review and test your implementation to ensure you are not inadvertently sharing data with unauthorized third parties. For more information on data security rules, see Data Access Security.

BREAKING CHANGES - WARNING!

The following is a cumulative list of potentially breaking changes from approximately the past 12 months, and may also include warnings about upcoming changes:

It is no longer possible to create a folder with a specified oid via POST /folders API (the oid is a system property assigned automatically).

Only the current owner or administrator can change the folder's owner via PATCH /folders/{id} API.

An incompatibility issue has been identified which causes freezing in single-node environments due to high CPU usage reaching 100% (CPU Soft lock crash). Instances running on Ubuntu 20/22 with kernel versions >= 5.15 and < 6.7 were found to be affected. This issue can lead to system freezes and Sisense upgrade failures. To resolve this, upgrading the Linux kernel to version 6.7 on your on-prem instances is critical before upgrading Sisense. See this Sisense Community article for instructions on upgrading the kernel.

This release introduces a significant change to the location where Sisense audit logs are stored. Read below carefully if you rely on accessing audit logs directly.

Audit logs were previously stored in a single location: /opt/sisense/storage/audit. Starting with version L2023.11, audit logs are now stored within individual tenant directories for enhanced security and organization. They are now stored in: /opt/sisense/storage/tenants/<tenant_id>/audit.

Impact: This change is considered breaking for users who access audit logs directly at the old location. Your existing scripts or processes must be updated to reflect the new path.

Google Chrome is planning to disable third-party cookies during 2024. Other browsers may potentially do the same. This deprecation may cause a breaking change in your solutions with embedded Sisense analytics, such as the user being redirected to the login page and the embedded solution not being loaded. To avoid this breaking change:

  • Use the same domain for the different apps and put it behind a specific path - this will make Sisense cookies not be third-party cookies.

For more information, see Third-Party Cookies.

Due to significant architectural changes required to deliver Viewpoints, after upgrading to version 2023.11 or newer, customers using Infusion Apps may experience unexpected behaviors, such as Views not able to be published from dashboards, Views not working within the Infusion Apps, etc.

To avoid or mitigate these issues requires additional upgrade steps specific to Infusion Apps. Contact Support for assistance.

As of November 2023, the Quest add-on no longer supports displaying Narratives as part of the Quest widget header information. Make sure to redesign and validate your implementation with the use of the native Narratives capabilities by that time.

Release Overview

Release L2024.1 provides a number of new improvements to Sisense for Linux.

What's Improved

Dashboards

The republish operation performance has been improved by optimizing the flow of removing redundant viewers' copies of the dashboards. This is useful for large-scale instances where republishing is done for thousands of users.

Embedding

When embedding Sisense, administrators can now filter the available embedded domains in the server response based on the ‘Referer’ or ‘Origin’ headers in the client app requests. To limit the domains listed in the server response to the current domain only, enable the Hide list of allowed domains toggle located in Admin > Security Settings > General.

Note:

If the client app does not send ‘Referer’ or ‘Origin’ headers, enabling this option will cause requests to fail.

Exploration Paths

Exploration path suggestions are now calculated from all dashboards with enabled 'Exploration path' that is based on the same data model that your dashboard is connected to.

Installation

Notebooks

Notebook's payload (only the content in cells of SQL queries, code, and text without the data preview) size is increased to 50 MB. This will reduce the amount of related errors.

Pulse Alerts

An additional option for Data Alerts is now available: 'Notify only when value changes'. When selected, the alert will only be triggered if it meets the condition and the data value is different from the last evaluation. This option can be used for any alert condition (Threshold/Automatic/Always) and in combination with other additional options.

Pulse page loading is optimized for better performance: the Pulse tiles are now loaded as the user scrolls down the page.

Users can now search the Pulses in the Pulse page by title of alert, by cube, or by dimension used for the alert.

Single Sign On (SSO)

The ability to configure the list of allowed target URLs is now available out-of-the-box for NEW deployments. Administrators can specify the whitelisted domains for redirect that can be passed in the query string parameters during the SSO flow (such as "return_to") by adding them to the 'Allowed Target URLs' field located in Admin > Security Settings (make sure to include the Sisense URL).

Note:

Upgrading customers can continue using your previously configured settings per the SSO method. If you prefer to switch to the new configuration, contact customer support for enabling ‘sso.newReturnToValidationBehavior’ located in Base Configuration > SSO.

What's Fixed

Add-ons

  • Advanced Formula - Shared formulas can now be saved even when the Advanced Formula add-on is installed, as expected. This relates to Advanced Formula version 1.3.8 or newer.

  • Interactive Pivot - The issue with incorrect columns being hidden by the Interactive Pivot add-on based on field id is now resolved.

  • Jump To Dashboard (JTD) -

    • JTD config styling is now correctly applied before applying Pivot styling.

    • When JTD is configured to jump from values on Pivot, it is no longer required to refresh the page in order to enable the jump after restoring a dashboard.

  • Print To Printer - The issue with the Print To Printer add-on causing a blank screen on dashboard loading is now fixed.

Dashboard Co-Authoring

  • Text widgets can now be created and saved as expected in co-owned dashboards.

  • The issue with previous co-owners seeing the empty version of a dashboard after disabling Dashboard Co-Authoring is now fixed.

  • Deleting widgets from Private mode no longer affects widgets in Shared mode, as expected.

Data Calculations

  • The weeks level filter now returns the correct result when fiscal year is enabled.

Data Modeling and Perspectives

Drilling

  • Drilling in date type fields now works as expected when months, weeks, or days granularity is selected.

File Manager

  • Infra - The File Manager, in the instances with the proxy URL configured, is now accessible and works as expected.

Filters

  • Top, Bottom, and Between now work as expected with formulas based on PREV and all DIFF functions.

Git

  • Git integration is now fully functional in the environments with the proxy URL configured.

Installation

Look and Feel

  • The button color configured in the Look and Feel theme is now applied to all of the buttons, including pop-up windows, as expected.

PDFs

  • Scripts added to assets such as dashboards or widgets are now applied when exporting to PDF.

Pulse

  • Pulse alerts are now created and work correctly when they are based on values that include the ">" symbol.

Single Sign On (SSO)

  • SSO groups association when using JWT now considers tenants.

Deprecations

  • The Limit Autocomplete add-on has been deprecated since L2021.9, but was still included by default in new deployments. It has now been removed from the list of pre-deployed add-ons in new deployments. A productised solution, Limit Users Sharing to Their Own Groups, is an officially supported and recommended option for controlling sharing limitations.