Vivid Trace Life Cycle

Effective date 2020 February 12

Vivid Trace's life cycle assists you in maximizing long-term value of your Vivid Trace deployment, especially in conjunction with your active maintenance subscription. Stability of your deployment is achieved in part through a feature release and patch regime that enables you to keep your deployment up-to-date by applying patches with confidence. Because patch releases do not introduce new features or other improvements, you can install newer releases to obtain new features and improvements at your discretion, without being forced onto a potentially destabilizing upgrade treadmill.

Support life cycle: Feature release lines each have their own support schedule, demarked by status: Full Support, later leading to Sunset status and eventually being archived as End of Support. Initially, a feature release receives Full Support, meaning that you can obtain support through Vivid Support and that Vivid actively supplies you with patch releases that you can apply with confidence and minimal fuss. After some time and according to a variety of factors, the release line transits to Sunset status, meaning Vivid continues to offer you support through Vivid Support but no longer produces patches except in special circumstances. Dwindling customer deployments and other factors precipitate eventual End of Support status where the release line is archived, effectively drawing an end to support from Vivid.

Life cycle status of Vivid Trace release lines. Only the most recent release line with End of Support status is included.

Updates to life cycle status: Vivid's product planning and engineering discipline prioritizes actual customer usage and needs. With the release of a new version, Vivid reviews and publishes updates regarding the support status of all release lines according to a variety of factors. Updates to the life cycle require customers to be alert for forthcoming modifications to their deployment. Vivid strives to provide reasonable advance notification of changes to the life cycle status. Such changes are announced in the accompanying Release Notes.

Release versioning scheme

Releases of Vivid Trace come in two types: Feature releases that introduce new features and increase the value of Vivid Trace to you, and Patch releases that fix known defects in feature releases.

Feature releases

Year

Sequence

Feature releases introduce new features and improvements. Feature releases are versioned with the year of their delivery and the sequence number of the release made within the given year. Generally, feature releases include patch fixes in aggregate from all other releases as feasible.

Patch releases

Year

Sequence

Patch

Patch releases solely provide fixes to defects. They are intended to be as reliable or better than any earlier patch versions within the same release line. In contrast to feature releases, patch releases do not introduce new features, meaning that they can be subjected to a lighter vetting process to speed deployment into your production environment.

Example

2031.3

The third feature release of Vivid Trace during calendar year 2031. As a feature release, it introduces new features and improvements. The sequence number 3 implies that two other feature releases were made during 2031 prior to this one, namely 2031.1 and 2031.2.

2031.3.1

The 1st patch release of 2031.3. Fixes some defects in 2031.3. Does not introduce any new functionality. Having deployed 2031.3 into your production environment, you likely want to upgrade to this patch release 2031.3.1.

2031.3.2

The 2nd patch release specific to 2031.3. Includes all defect fixes of 2031.3.1 plus additional fixes, thereby superceding 2031.3 and 2031.3.1. Upon release, this patch release becomes the best vintage of the 2031.3 release line, and Vivid recommends you to upgrade to it. To access newer features and improvements beyond the 2031.3 release line, you would need to install a newer feature release, be it 2031.4 or 2032.1 or beyond.

Perpetual license holders may continue to use eligible releases past their End of Support dates. From time to time, extenuating circumstances may necessitate the retraction of a specific Vivid Trace release; retractions are documented in the appropriate Release Notes and retracted releases are not supported.