Release Notes

Universal Agent release 7.9.0.0 contains the following high-level features. For a complete list of all the included features and fixes please refer to the Universal Agent 7.9.x Maintenance list.

Statement of HP-UX Support

The Universal Agent for HP-UX will is no longer provided starting with UA 7.9.0.0.

It is still supported and available upon request for actively supported maintenance releases. It will no longer be supported when Universal Agent 7.8.x goes out of support in March 2027.

z/OS 2.4 End of Support Statement

Universal Agent 7.9.x is the last version that will support z/OS 2.4. z/OS 2.4 will no longer be supported when Universal Agent 7.9.x goes out of support in September 2027.

IBM withdrew support for z/OS 2.4 in 2024.

Change in Default Behavior

B-22163 (see below) delivers a change in default behavior for the way in which traces and metrics are exported via the Universal Agent's OpenTelemetry integration. These items are now encoding using the protobuf binary format. The previous default that uses JSON encoding is still provided and may be configured using the new OTEL_HTTP_TRACE_PROTOCOL and OTEL_HTTP_METRICS_PROTOCOL options.

Change to Distribution File Names

Universal Agent distribution files that were previously compressed using the compress utility are now compressed with gzip.

This change results in smaller distribution file sizes, but also changes their extensions from tar.Z to tar.gz.

Windows distribution files and distributions files previously compressed with bzip2 or zip are not affected.

Application Integrations

Backlog Title Description

B-22445

Update Universal Agent for SOA logging implementation

Replace deprecated log4j 1.2.17 with actively-maintained reload4j 1.2.26. reload4j is a fork of the log4j project and is a drop-in replacement.

reload4j is installed to the following locations:

The ./universal/UAI/lib folder
The axis2 deployment for UAC Server's local Tomcat instance that resides in ./universal/UAC/container.

Data Observability

Backlog

Title

Description

B-18732

Improve OpenTelemetry intregration visibility

Explicitly set and expose the OpenTelemetry schema URL used for traces and metrics exposed by the Universal Agent and Universal Extension tasks.

Providing the schema URL with each trace message or metric provides information about the format of the data being exported and details the semantic conventions used by the OpenTelemetry library 3pp vendor library.

B-22163

Provide protobuf binary encoding support to OpenTelemetry integration

Add support to export traces and metrics in protobuf binary format. Provides the new OTEL_HTTP_TRACE_PROTOCOL and OTEL_HTTP_METRICS_PROTOCOL configuration options to switch between JSON and binary (the default) encoding.

Default Behavior Change

Note that starting with the UA 7.9.0.0 release, the default encoding has changed from JSON to protobuf binary.

Universal Extension tasks using OpenTelemetry features now require Python 3.8 or higher.

IBMz Enhancements

Backlog	Title	Description
B-21687	Add VSAM data set support to Universal Data Mover	The UDM copy command will now accept a VSAM dataset – specified by its cluster or data component name – and transfer its contents to a sequential dataset on z/OS or flat file on a distributed Unix or Windows system.
B-22260	Enhance read/write sharing of datasets for Universal Data Mover transfers	Provide a new dsreserve attribute that can be used to enable global sharing for any dataset opened for input or output.

Packaging/Distribution

Backlog

Title

Description

B-22312

Change compression method for Universal Agent distribution files

Replace the compress utility with gzip for distribution file compression to reduce file sizes.

File Name Change

This change replaces .tar.Z distribution file extensions with .tar.gz.

Platform Support

Backlog	Title	Description
B-18372	Add AARCH64 platform support	Provide an RPM installation of Universal Agent for the Linux AARCH64 platform.
B-21393	Certify Universal Agent for Windows Server 2025	Universal Agent 7.8.x releases starting with 7.8.1.1 and Universal Agent 7.9.0.0 are now certified for Windows Server 2025.

Security

Backlog	Title	Description
B-22215	Add TLS/SNI support to Universal Data Mover	Implement TLS/SNI support for UDM to provide the ability for UDM and UDM Server to connect to an Agent running inside of a container.

Workload Automation Features

Backlog	Title	Description
B-22083	Increase the environment variable space for Linux/Unix and IBM i tasks	Provides a change that removes restrictions on the number of environment variables that can be provided to a Unix or IBM i task. The previous implementation limited the number of environment variables to 2000 on the affected platforms, but Universal Agent will now recognize as many environment variables as the system supports.

Universal Agent 7.9.0.0 Release Notes