Today we’re releasing the Ignore functionality for your solution cards. That means you can take full control over what type of solutions you’d like to see. Just as importantly, you can now report false positives where needed.

Hide cards you no longer want to see

Imagine you would like to hide the WordPress update card like the one above. All it takes is a simple click on the Ignore button, and it will take you to a wizard-style menu where you can add constraints about ignoring that particular card.

It is possible to hide the card forever, or you can tell the filter to hide just that particular version (note, if a new version of the software gets released, the card will be visible again).

View hidden cards

When you’ve hidden solution cards, they are not really gone. As the word describes, they are just hidden. When one or more cards are no longer visible, an option will be shown to view your hidden cards. They’re present in the same format as regular ones.

If you no longer want a filter to be applied, take a look at the Filters view where you can remove your active filters.

Until next time with a new awesome feature!

What better way to start the summer than with a brand new release of PatrolServer, we’ve very proud to announce version 1.1.0 is now available to all of you.

No matter how you use PatrolServer, whether it’s the API, or our dashboard and scanner, you’re going to love this new version. We integrated the most requested features, polished both the front and back-end and made the entire experience a whole lot faster. We put a strong focus on developers past months, keep on reading for more exciting news. You’ll love this as much as we do, for sure!

Filtering

Technically speaking, filtering cards is not a new feature, it has been enabled for most accounts for the past few months. Today, the feature is officially out of beta phase. We’ve been tweaking the ability to filter cards under the hood, as well as restoring cards is now possible by clicking the “restore” button. Below is a small demonstration on how you can filter out unwanted cards.

Verification with Bash Scanner

In the previous version, verifying your server was only possible by us sending an email to the administrator account of the domain or by uploading a HTML file to your server. We decided to put Bash Scanner a little more in the spotlight (seriously, you’ll benefit the best of the features when installing Bash Scanner), thus the new default verification method is now by using the scanner.

If you prefer to use alternative methods such as uploading the HTML file or by using email, they are still there under the “Alternate methods” tab.

Reminders

Server reminders has been the most requested feature of the past few months. Basically what it does is, at each chosen interval (either weekly or monthly), we’ll send you a reminder of all the issues on your servers over various mails. The new “Mail settings” page gives you more control over what emails you’ll get and which ones you’d like to exclude.

Analytics

You can now see detailed analytics data for your scanned servers. It might take some time until PatrolServer gathered enough information over a various amount of time, but analytics gives you a status over time of your current servers.

We also got graphs available to display the amount of exploits and vulnerabilities over time, but we leave those up to you to discover. If you’d like to visit the brand new analytics page, click on your server name on the left top, and select “Graphs”, it’s next under the filter view.

Looking at our own internal analytics has been a lot of fun, we hope you like them as much as we do!

For Developers

Brand new API documentation

PatrolServer is a service for developers to keep track of outdated software on their servers. We run a daily scan on your servers, to make sure you run updated software. We would like to make it easy for you developers to integrate with our services and delivery across many platforms. Our powerful APIs are here to provide you a smooth integration with your own project. Our developer tools allow you to access your own data within the PatrolServer architecture. Our ultimate goal is to cover most virtual facets of PatrolServer, for you to integrate whenever you want.

Developers can now enjoy the brand new API documentation pages. They are much more structured and provide examples for all interactions with the PatrolServer API.

Visit the API documentation now!

PHP SDK

The PHP SDK provides a stable interface to implement PatrolServer functionality in your own applications. The SDK makes integration child’s play. Take a look at the example below on how easy it is to intercept when your server finished scanning. You can do all kind of interactions after.

// Use the Singleton or create a separate PatrolSdk\Patrol object
use PatrolSdk\Singleton as Patrol;

Patrol::setApiKey('194786f61ea856b6468c0c41fa0d4bdb');
Patrol::setApiSecret('DC360a34e730ae96d74f545a286bfb01468cd01bb191eed49d9e421c2e56f958');

Patrol::webhook('scan_finished', function ($event) {
    $server_id = $event['server_id'];

    if ($server_id) {
        // Get the Server object from the server_id
        $server = Patrol::server($server_id);

        // Get the installed software
        $software = $server->allSoftware();
    }
});

Take a look at the PatrolServer PHP SDK on GitHub, we’ve also written a Laravel Facade with various other features such as automatically updating composer modules the moment they become outdated.

Under the hood

We detect a whole lot more software than ever before, thus we had to tweak performance in order to provide the same smooth experience as before. The team and I have rewritten card generation from scratch, with better performance in mind. We now extensively rely on caching mechanisms, as well as pre-generating data when users are the least active on our platform (eg; at midnight, we perform more resource heavy tasks than during the day).

On average, resource heavy actions are at-least 60% faster than before.

Nowadays, we support a vast majority of the most popular npm modules. We’ve added 80.000 more npm modules to the scanner and we’re counting. The PatrolServer scanner is able to find over 160.000 different installed software (+ modules, packages, …) on your server.

Feel free to give our new changes a try, and as always, thank you for using PatrolServer!