(Be sure to sign up for the product update webinar on June 16, 2021, at 10:00 a.m. PDT. The webinar features technical demos on the features discussed in this article).
GridGain Control Center is a comprehensive troubleshooting, management, and monitoring solution for Apache Ignite and the GridGain platform. While Ignite and the GridGain platform enable the building of high-performance, scalable applications, troubleshooting and monitoring distributed clusters can be tricky. We developed Control Center to simplify key troubleshooting tasks—to help developers be more productive as they build and manage applications on Ignite or on the GridGain platform. Control Center is now available as a SaaS solution that is offered via a free 30-day trial.
Control Center simplifies Ignite-specific tasks, such as optimizing queries, using tracing to debug stability and performance issues, setting up snapshots for cache data backup and recovery, and optimizing cache data distribution across the cluster. In addition, Control Center performs routine monitoring tasks such as tracking cluster metrics, via customizable dashboards, and setting up alerts. With the Teams feature, you can enable a group of users to form a team and share configuration resources. Thus, Control Center can be used as a standalone observability platform.
In addition, Control Center complements observability solutions such as Zabbix and Prometheus. You use your existing monitoring stack to manage basic cluster functions, and, when an Ignite-specific or GridGain-specific performance issue arises, Control Center provides contextual information that helps you quickly and clearly identify the root cause of the problem and then fix the problem.
Common Ignite Troubleshooting Scenarios
Let's review how you can use Control Center to quickly resolve typical troubleshooting scenarios. When developing applications, many Ignite users use SQL syntax. Sometimes SQL queries that are not optimized require more time to run. Troubleshooting such queries manually can be time consuming, because you often need to analyze all the logs of your cluster nodes; check execution query plans; and, as a last resort, enable tracing and observe detailed logs. With Control Center, you can quickly troubleshoot SQL queries. You can check the status of running SQL queries, visualize spikes in CPU and memory usage, identify a root cause, and fix the queries that consume too many resources.
Video demo: Debug SQL query performance bottlenecks
Control Center also simplifies the process of identifying and debugging degraded transaction performance and degraded performance of other key-value and SQL operations. Developers who encounter issues with transactions can leverage Control Center tracing to quickly identify transactions that do not meet performance requirements, to visualize the API call stack, and to view span details as transactions execute. Thus, developers can pinpoint the root cause of the performance problem in the application code.
Video demo: Trace and troubleshoot long running transactions
We highly encourage developers and DevOps teams to leverage the monitoring and management capabilities of Control Center for production environments. Control Center provides Ignite-specific capabilities that can help ensure that clusters are running as expected and that can help developers and DevOps teams be proactive.
For example, Control Center can be configured to send out alerts when data starts to skew in your cluster. In addition, the Ignite and GridGain platform specific Heat Map visualization allows you to view data partition distribution to confirm uneven data growth and update data distribution to balance the cluster. Another example, Control Center can be configured to send you a high priority alert if a node goes offline unexpectedly. You can go into the UI and quickly check caches and tables for lost and corrupted data.
Start Your Free Control Center SaaS Trial
Control Center is now available as a managed monitoring service. To begin, sign up for a free 30-day trial account and attach your cluster. During the trial period, you can monitor and manage as many clusters as you want. We make sure that Control Center is up and ready whenever you need it.
Control Center SaaS provides a subscription model, billed monthly or annually. This model is based on the number of cluster nodes that you need to manage and monitor. The subscription includes up to 3GB of metric and tracing data storage per node so that you can track performance trends across longer periods of time.
So, that’s it! You create an account, bring your clusters, start tracking your application performance, and we take care of the rest.
For users who need an on-prem deployment option, Control Center is available as downloadable software. The software version offers flexible enterprise pricing options. To request access, please contact our sales team.
Resources
- Get Started with Control Center SaaS
- Join us at the Control Center product update webinar
- Watch a video overview of Control Center
- Debug Apache Ignite SQL query performance bottlenecks: Video Demo / Tutorial
- Trace and troubleshoot long running transactions: Video Demo / Tutorial
- Proactively manage data skews to optimize cluster utilization: Tutorial
- Upgrade clusters while in production, with zero downtime: Video Demo
- Simplify Apache Ignite backup management and recovery: Video Demo
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