Management Center 4.2020.08 is Released

Management Center 4.2020.08 is released! Let’s see what this new release brings.

Jet Support

Previously, Management Center supported management and monitoring of only Hazelcast IMDG clusters and any Jet-specific tasks, such as job monitoring and snapshots, had to be managed via a separate dedicated Jet Management Center application. With this release, the two Management Centers have been unified into one application, offering a single, integrated monitoring and management tool for all the Hazelcast Cluster types.

Jet users will now be able to take advantage of the security and operational features of Management Center, including support for different authentication mechanisms (Active Directory, LDAP, JAAS) and audit logging. They will now be able to monitor and manage the underlying IMDG cluster from within the same tool.

Other benefits include the ability to manage multiple clusters and a new clustered JMX API for Jet jobs and snapshots. The free version of Management Center will let Jet users monitor clusters that have up to 3 members, whereas they could previously only monitor single-member clusters with the free version of Jet Management Center. See the Monitoring a Jet Cluster section in the reference manual for more information.

New Metrics Engine

The metrics system has been completely revamped in this release and now provides more detailed metrics. The Management Center Dashboard and all of the graphs and tables have been updated to take advantage of the new metrics system. Graphs are now customizable widgets which let you define which metrics should be displayed and support showing more than one metric per graph. A new feature is to graph the median value of the selected metric and then highlight any outliers to quickly identify potential issues. See the Widget section in the reference manual for more information.

New Metrics Storage

The “Time Travel” feature has been replaced with a new Metrics Persistence feature where the metrics are stored on disk with better performance, less disk footprint and more flexible querying. Metric Persistence is enabled by default and stores the last 24 hours on disk. This, of course, can be disabled or set to a user-defined number of days.

Prometheus Exporter

Management Center has a Clustered REST and a Clustered JMX API that enables programmatic access to its monitoring data. Today, we are delighted to add a Clustered Prometheus Exporter. Prometheus is one of the most widely used monitoring and time-series databases on the market. Thanks to our new metrics storage, we are now able to export all metric data we have on Management Center to Prometheus, which you might already have in your stack. You could also use the HTTP endpoint used for this purpose for debugging and see the raw metrics data exposed by cluster members for yourself. See the Prometheus Exporter section in the reference manual for more information.

New Version Numbering Scheme

As you might have noticed, we no longer follow the same version numbering system used by Hazelcast IMDG or Jet. We change to a scheme which has the following structure:

<major cluster version>.<year>.<month>[.<patch>]

We change the version numbering to avoid any confusion. Previously, we had a policy where any minor Management Center release supported the last two IMDG minor versions. For example, Management Center 3.12 supported IMDG versions 3.11 and 3.12. Since Management Center now supports two products with independent release cycles, we can no longer be in sync with the version numbers used by them.

For this reason, we have changed the version numbering scheme to avoid any confusion as to which cluster versions we test against and list all tested cluster versions in our reference manual. Management Center 4.2020.08 is fully compatible with IMDG 4.0 and Jet 4.2.

Dev Mode

Previously, you had to configure an authentication mechanism before using Management Center. Although we still recommend configuring an authentication mechanism for production usage, we now offer the Dev Mode which lets you skip this step and start using Management Center quickly during development. See the Dev Mode section in the reference manual for more information.

Other Changes

You can see the list of all changes in this version in the release notes.

What’s Next?

We were working on a new design for our user interface in the past few months. In the following months, we plan to apply it to our user interface. We also plan to add support for monitoring more data structure types (set, list, ringbuffer, event journal etc.) and better data browsing features. If there is a feature that you would specifically like to see, join the Hazelcast Community Slack and let us know.