v2.11.1 - 15/Sep/2026

Release Notes: SUSE® Observability Helm Chart v2.11.1

Component Versions

Component Version

SUSE Observability

2.11.1

SUSE Observability Agent

1.6.1

SUSE Observability CLI

3.9.0

SUSE Observability - StackPacks 2.0

Overview

StackPacks 2.0 makes it possible to integrate any technology into SUSE Observability through configuration alone. A StackPack maps OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs into topology, and extends the UI with overview pages, detail-page widgets, menu items, and dashboards. StackPacks are published and shared through an open, community-driven Git marketplace and are automatically exposed to AI assistants via the SUSE Observability MCP Server.

What’s New

  • Configuration-Driven Ingestion: Map raw OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs into topology maps and dashboards through configuration only. No platform code changes or custom plugins are required, so a new technology can be onboarded in minutes rather than months.

  • Extensible UI: StackPacks can now add and update overview pages, widgets on detail pages, menu items, and dashboards. This lets a StackPack deliver a complete, technology-specific experience rather than topology alone.

  • Community-Driven StackPack Marketplace: StackPacks can be built, extended, and shared through a public GitHub repository. StackPacks are based on open, vendor-neutral schema standards, so contributions from the community and partners work across environments.

Example Use Case

Engineering teams deploying AI frameworks such as vLLM, Ollama, or LangChain on Kubernetes can ship a StackPack that maps their OTel data into topology, adds dedicated dashboards and detail-page widgets, and exposes the resulting metrics to AI assistants for root-cause analysis.

Getting Started

  • Browse and install StackPacks from the public GitHub marketplace.

  • Author or extend a StackPack using the open schema to map your OTel data and define UI extensions. (Fun fact: StackPacks can be fully authored with current leading-edge AI models.)

  • Create a pull request to share your StackPacks with the community.

Resources

New Features & Enhancements

  • UI Usability: Form drawers no longer restore automatically upon accidental closure (such as clicking the overlay or pressing the Escape key).

  • Trace Inspection: Added the ability to perform detailed inspections of trace spans and span events.

  • StackPack Version Management: Added the ability to install specific versions of a StackPack rather than defaulting to the latest version.

  • Integration Ownership: Configuration items shipped by integrations now have immutable ownership and cannot be locked or unlocked. This applies to monitors, dashboards, views, main menu groups, and other resources.

  • StackGraph v2 Backup & Restore: Introduced a new stackgraph-v2 backup and restore system featuring incremental backups and significant performance improvements for both backup and restore operations.

  • Resource & Performance Optimizations:

    • Reduced overall CPU usage when working within the Topology perspective.

    • Limited S3Proxy to 32 threads to prevent out-of-memory (OOM) errors when multiple restore operations execute concurrently.

  • Storage Configuration: Per-volume storageClass overrides now take precedence over global.storageClass for Kafka, ZooKeeper, ClickHouse, and Elasticsearch volumes.

Bug Fixes

  • Topology Perspective: The "Find Component" feature now correctly shifts focus directly to the target component.

  • Monitors: Fixed an issue where the Out of Memory monitor disappeared due to an incorrect label value.

  • Kubernetes & Helm Security:

    • Trust Store Secrets: Trust stores can now be loaded from user-managed Kubernetes secrets rather than inline Helm values. This avoids exceeding the 1MB Helm release secret limit during upgrades.

    • Restricted Pod Security Standard Compliance: All containers across both Helm charts now execute with the required securityContext specified by the restricted Pod Security Standard, preventing admission failures on CIS-hardened RKE2 or Rancher-restricted clusters.

  • FIPS Compliance (Elasticsearch): Fixed Elasticsearch startup failures on FIPS-enabled nodes by including the complete NSS runtime and correcting the PKCS#11 FIPS configuration.

  • Agent Workload Customization: Added support for configuring podAnnotations and podLabels per individual agent workload (clusterAgent, nodeAgent, checksAgent, logsAgent, and remoteKubeCache). This enables users to selectively disable monitors on specific agent pods via Helm values.

  • Platform CLI: Fixed an issue where PromQL-based monitors could not be cloned via the CLI.

  • Topology Synchronization: Fixed an issue where an initial topology sync snapshot prevented switching the active host.

  • Backup & Restore Infrastructure:

    • CronJob Policies: The backup-init CronJob now sets concurrencyPolicy: Forbid.

    • Pod Cleanup: The backup-init Job and CronJob now use restartPolicy: OnFailure, preventing orphaned pods from lingering after failed attempts.

    • VictoriaMetrics Data Protection: Hourly VictoriaMetrics backups now refuse to overwrite completed backups if the local instance contains no data older than 24 hours (configurable via victoria-metrics-<instance>.backup.minHistorySeconds). Refused backups exit with a non-zero code to trigger the VictoriaMetricsBackupsPerformed alert within three hours.

    • Backup CLI Fixes: Added automatic retries when port-forwarding fails, and fixed the status check logic during Elasticsearch restores to ensure the CLI waits until all indices and shards reach a healthy state.

Agent Bug Fixes

  • Log Agent Performance: Reduced the default CPU limit for the logs agent.

  • Configuration Rendering: Resolved an issue where setting global.extraLabels or global.extraAnnotations generated invalid YAML in the cluster-name and URL ConfigMaps, which previously caused STS_CLUSTER_NAME and the receiver URL to be dropped.