For Customers of Existing Commercial Apps

If you’re a customer of one of our existing commercial apps for Splunk, here’s what you need to know.

In Splunk 8 and higher, you will have to install our ​“Canary” app.
Put another way, our existing commercial apps will not run at all on Splunk 8 until Canary is also installed on the Search Head or SHC.

Canary is essentially a replacement for the old Sideview Utils app. As of Cisco CDR version 6.2.2, you don’t need to keep Sideview Utils installed anymore, but you definitely need Canary.

Should I upgrade the apps first or Splunk first?
It’s a best practice, at least for Sideview’s apps, to upgrade the apps to the latest before upgrading Splunk itself. Contact us if you have questions.

You can download and install Canary today.
It is easy to get Canary installed because it’s also on Splunkbase — from Splunk’s in-product Apps browser (go to Apps > Find more apps > search for ​‘canary’).

Don’t I have to get 8.0 in order to run Canary?
No – Canary runs fine on both 7.X and 8.X.

If your Splunk deployment is unable to reach Splunkbase, you can also download it as a tar.gz file from Splunkbase, or directly from this website.

The functionality of your app will be unchanged, however, the look and feel of the UI will be noticeably different.
We’re eager to hear any and all feedback, and certainly let us know if you find anything that isn’t working correctly and we’ll fix it right away.

We hope that the change is positive. For one thing, pages in the Canary UI render a great deal faster. Certainly faster than they did before in the old Splunk UI.

You don’t need any new special license.
As a part of your existing license agreement for the commercial app, Sideview is effectively granting you a license to use the Canary app in conjunction with that commercial app.

The app is fully supported to run in the Canary UI on Splunk 8 and up, and is currently still supported on 7.3 in the old Splunk UI (although this will end sometime this year).

Canary runs fine in both Python2 and Python3.
Canary’s pieces are already all tested and supported in Python3, so Canary will run just fine on Splunk 8. If you encounter any problems, of course, let us know. If you find that Splunk’s ​“Platform Upgrade Readiness App” is flagging our apps as not compatible in Python3, please just ignore it. The Upgrade Readiness App as of this writing has a bug where it does not necessarily notice that we have certified that the apps run on Python3 already.

What if some of our team members figured out how to use the Sideview Editor and started making their own interactive Sideview XML views?
This is actually a little unlikely! However, if this is a possibility, then you should also read this other FAQ for Sideview XML view developers.