Reference / Release notes

Agate 1.0.0

The first numbered release of Cenovel. It keeps funded records safe from the deleted-records purge, adds Replace for failed switches, stack members and parts, connects Juniper Mist, and brings the hardware catalog up to date, access points included. It follows equipment from purchase to disposal: storerooms with receiving, a kiosk and RFID doorways, purchase orders and invoices, E-Rate compliance checks, physical counts, and disposal orders with approvals and sanitization records.

Release notesReleased October 3, 2026All releases

New

Replace a failed switch, stack member or part in place. The position keeps its name, ports, links and management address, and you decide whether the old unit goes to a storeroom, the RMA board or disposal. Replacement and disposition
When Find devices reads a different serial at a known position, Cenovel asks you to confirm a replacement instead of adding the switch as new equipment. Replace a failed switch
Connect Juniper Mist with a read-only token. Cenovel reads Mist's sites, inventory, device status, events and alarms every 5 minutes, and you map each Mist site to a Cenovel site yourself. Juniper Mist
An access point that Mist reports as disconnected opens an outage worded as Mist's report, kept separate from devices that are not answering Cenovel.
Optional Mist webhooks: a signed disconnect, reconnect or alarm event asks for an immediate read, so the change shows within seconds instead of at the next scheduled read. Optional webhooks
Site types are yours to edit. Add, rename, reorder and delete them, move a type's sites to another type when you delete it, and set the type of many sites at once. Give each site a type
Mark a site type as Priority. Outages at its sites are Critical and their alerts say URGENT, and its devices are read every 2 minutes, with an outage opening after 4 minutes without an answer. Both times can be changed. Outages and planned maintenance
Each status label now maps to a product state, such as in stock, in use, in repair or disposed, so you can rename labels without breaking storage, RMA or disposal. Status states
Settings has a Funding sources list, and a record's funding source must come from it. Asset tags follow a tag scheme you set in Settings.
Record whether a device is approved to connect, with the date of the decision.
A MAC address can belong to only one live record. A duplicate typed with different punctuation or case is refused.
Contracts on the Vendors page: support, subscription, license, purchase and co-op contracts, with start and end dates for each covered serial.
Each asset shows its coverage as Covered until a date, Not covered with the reason, or Not recorded.
Renewals and Coverage gaps under Vendors show what is about to end, what has lapsed, and units still covered after disposal or past end of life. Renewal notices go out ahead of each contract's notice period, 90 days by default.
Advance-replacement RMAs track when the failed unit is owed back, and the RMA board shows a return as overdue.
A current hardware catalog: Cisco Catalyst 9000 and Catalyst 1200 and 1300 switches, Cisco and Juniper routers, Juniper EX and QFX switches, and current Extreme switches, many with front and rear drawings. Supported hardware
Storerooms receive deliveries, hold units for pickup and accept returns. A reservation expires on its own, and custody changes only when the person receiving the unit accepts it.
A storeroom kiosk: sign in with a badge and PIN, collect a pickup, and be signed out after each pickup or after a minute without activity.
Set a minimum number of spares per storeroom and model. Shortfalls appear in the morning digest.
Purchase orders, invoices and suppliers under Vendors. A unit's purchase order line sets its cost and funding, which can be split across funding sources by percent or by amount.
Attach typed documents, such as packing slips, invoices and certificates. Removing a document hides it and keeps the file.
Imports show a preview first, then apply all or nothing, and can receive units onto a purchase order line.
An E-Rate compliance workspace: entities and their BENs, FRNs and Form 471 lines, the Category 2 budget for each cycle, and a register you can export by FRN, funding year or BEN. Run an E-Rate cycle
Transfers of E-Rate funded equipment are checked against the program rules. A transfer to another district within 3 years of purchase is refused, with the date it becomes allowed. Each rule shows its source and the date it was last checked.
Disposal of E-Rate funded equipment installed for less than 5 years is refused wherever a unit can be disposed of.
Physical counts: count a place and everything under it, blind by default, with several people scanning at once. Review what is missing, resolve each exception, and close the count with a signed record of what was found.
Each asset shows when it was last checked in person, separately from when a device last reported it.
Report a unit lost or stolen. A second Administrator EX approves the report, and a theft needs a police report number.
A federal equipment inventory report built from physical checks, with a CSV download, and a list of places due for a count: every 12 months by default, and never more than 24 months for places that hold federal equipment.
Disposal orders: declare, approve, sanitize, collect and certify. Approvals come from someone other than the person who declared the order, and a unit becomes Disposed only when its order is certified.
Sanitization records following NIST SP 800-88: method, tool, verification, who did it and who validated it. A record cannot be edited after it is saved.
Each model records whether it holds configuration or credentials. A model with no answer recorded is treated as one that does.
Units received into a storeroom go onto their purchase order line and E-Rate plan line, and each receipt counts as an in-person check.
Fixed RFID readers at storeroom doorways record units leaving and returning, through the site collector. A reading never changes custody on its own. A reader starts by only observing; it can act on its own only after a commissioning test of at least 300 passages with at least 99% correct and no false moves.
A storeroom kiosk can also run a blind count of its own room, signed in with a badge.
Deleted records on a purchase order line, or bought with a federal award, are kept from the purge like funded records.
If this fails: from a site, closet or switch, see everything that depends on it, which devices have only one path up, and the recorded chain up to the main closet.
Port heat on the switch page: color each port by link, speed, errors or PoE, with a table of the same values. A switch read only over SSH says why it has no error counts.
Topology opens on an uplink tree of each site’s closets, showing how each is connected and where a single failure would cut others off. It exports as SVG or for draw.io.
An operations timeline on Outages › History and on each site’s Activity tab: outages, maintenance windows, work and checks on one time line.
The E-Rate overview has a funding-year swimlane: program dates with their sources, FRN deadlines, the Category 2 budget, and each wave’s planned, received and installed units.
The current access points that Cisco (Catalyst, Catalyst Wireless and Meraki), Juniper Mist and Extreme sell are in the catalog. Cenovel maps an access point to its model from SSH, SNMP, Mist, ExtremeCloud IQ, or a switch’s CDP or LLDP neighbor. An access point that is not in the catalog is reported as such, never matched to a similar model. Supported hardware
Cisco access points are recognized over SSH.
The console shows the release it is running, such as Cenovel Agate 1.0, at the foot of every page. Open it for the release date, build, schema and collector version.

Improved

Deleted records that were funded, or that have RMA, replacement or disposal history, are never purged. Recently deleted shows how long each one is kept and why. E-Rate funding and retention
Maintenance windows offer only what Cenovel monitors, each listed once, and a closet window quiets only that closet. When a window ends with something still down, it returns to Outages and alerts once. Run a maintenance window
The E-Rate evidence pack has a Replaced units sheet with each serial chain, and its Deleted funded units sheet says how long each unit is kept.
Check-in can send a unit to RMA, which opens its vendor case, or to disposal.
Questions in words use your own site type names. Rename Elementary to Primary, and “primary schools” works. Questions in words
Outage history's “How long they last” counts only real recoveries. It leaves out outages closed because a device was removed or is no longer watched.
A switch that refuses an extra SSH session is recorded as busy, never as silent, and does not open an outage.
Site types show how often their sites are polled, and each site page shows its polling interval and when it last answered.
Mist site mapping no longer guesses from overlapping words. At most an exact name match is offered as a hint, and only you can confirm a mapping.
Notification channels can again subscribe to lifecycle and RMA notices, which renewals, coverage endings and overdue returns now send. Notifications and morning reports
Today's Do next is a compact list: one line per item, problems at one site grouped into one row, at most five rows before Show all, and each outage with its own evidence.
The E-Rate documents library opens on the documents themselves, with filters for category, year, FRN and official documents, and documents link to their FRNs.
Status marks on cards and callouts use a different shape for each tone, so they do not depend on color alone.
Cenovel draws its charts itself, showing the same values as before. The console downloads about 170 KB less, and bar charts you can click work better with screen readers.
Charts use even axis steps and whole numbers for counts, wrap long labels instead of cutting them, and can be read by keyboard, one mark at a time, with a tooltip and a table of the same values.
Fans and power supplies light their drawn bays on current Juniper EX and QFX switches and Extreme 5520 switches.

Fixed

A known switch is no longer queued as new equipment after one missed SSH probe. The first probe is retried.
A closet whose switch was polled before no longer says no switch has been polled when the last poll was more than a day ago.
Bulk edit previews name the status, location and model instead of showing numbers.
Asset pages offer Add a link to people allowed to add links, and the control to remove a link is visible again.
When a project plan change is refused because someone else changed it first, the reason stays on screen.
Projects, work items and phase owners show people's names instead of their sign-in addresses.
Today offers Post notice to people who can post notices.
The Movements page shows the asset in its Asset column.
Saving a model with a catalog name that is already taken is refused in plain words instead of failing with an error.
Contract changes appear in the audit history.
The sign-in screen has its Pause background motion control again.
Discovered Cisco IOS XE switches and routers are identified by the model they print, and a license-tier suffix is added only to models that Cisco sells with one.
The consumables table and the project work items table fit at desktop widths.
Today and the morning report keep PoE, SSH, UPS and similar terms in capitals.
Two switches saved for the first time at the same moment no longer stall each other during a sweep.
On the Extreme 5520-24X and 5520-24T rear drawings, the two power supplies were swapped. They now match the vendor’s figure.
The purchasing register shows the day a unit was disposed of, once its disposal order is certified.

Security

The Mist token is stored as a credential and never appears in error messages, addresses or logs. Cenovel talks only to Mist's official regional address and refuses redirects.
Mist webhooks are off by default. When they are on, each delivery's signature is checked, and forged or replayed deliveries are refused.
Mist activity is logged through the same redaction as the rest of the console.
Link controls and Post notice are offered only to people whom the server will allow to use them.

Upgrade notes

Take a backup and verify it with a restore drill before you upgrade. This is mandatory: there is no rollback to the previous image after this release, so the verified backup is the only way back. Create and verify a native backup
If the upgrade fails part-way, restore that backup. The previous image will not start on a database that has been partly upgraded. Upgrades & rollback
Plan for under 2 minutes of downtime. In rehearsal on a copy of a production database, the database upgrade took about 5 seconds.
Priority sites are read every 2 minutes from the moment you upgrade, and an outage opens after 4 minutes without an answer. To start more slowly, change Read priority sites every under Settings › Locations › Site types.
Site types whose sites were already treated as urgent by name, such as offices and bus lots, become Priority.
Any status label that Cenovel could not map to a product state is listed in Settings › Statuses. Choose a state for it, or delete it if nothing uses it.
Deleted records with no funding and no other history are still removed for good after the restorable period, 30 days by default. To keep them longer, raise Keep deleted records restorable for in Settings › Data retention (up to 365 days).
The average outage length under Outages › History drops after the upgrade, because it now counts only real recoveries.
On a new installation, asset tags are not numbered until you set a tag scheme.
E-Rate funded units with no install date cannot be moved to Pending disposal or Disposed until the install date is entered.
Purchase order numbers typed on assets and E-Rate plans are carried into purchase order records. For a unit on a purchase order line, cost and funding come from that line and cannot be typed on the unit.
A unit becomes Disposed only through a certified disposal order. By default an order needs one approval from an Administrator or Administrator EX other than the person who declared it. Review the approval chain under Disposal before the first order.
Places are due for a physical count every 12 months by default, and never more than 24 months where federal equipment is held. Review the interval under Audits.
Review each RFID reader’s mode in Settings before relying on it. Readers start by observing only.

Known issues

Some Cisco models have no drawing, because Cisco publishes only representative figures for them, and some ports are unnumbered where the vendor does not state their names. Supported hardware
The Mist connection has been tested against a simulation of Mist's documented interface, not yet against a live Mist organization.
Two-minute polling of priority sites has been tested against simulated switches. Watch the first day's reads at those sites.
A read requested by a Mist webhook is lost if Cenovel restarts before it runs; the regular 5-minute read covers it.
An alert queued just before a maintenance window starts is not sent again when the window ends.
On the Extreme 7520, 7720, 8520, 8720 and 5420 models, a discovered fan or power supply does not light its drawn bay, because the vendor does not publish which bay is which.
RFID doorways have been tested with a simulated reader, not yet with a real reader, antennas and people walking through.
For some access points the vendor publishes no exact text for what the device reports over SSH, SNMP or CDP. Those were mapped from the vendor’s documented patterns.
A Mist access point seen only through a switch’s LLDP neighbor cannot be mapped to a model, because Mist does not send its model there.
Accepting a large batch of returns at once is slow: 250 units take about 24 seconds.