March 2018 Summaries

Visualizing and alerting for Apache Kafka and system resource data is essential for smooth operations, which can be achieved using Aiven's in-house solution. Using InfluxDB and Grafana, Aiven customers can seamlessly collect and visualize Aiven Kafka and system resource telemetry. The built-in dashboards include Kafka specific metrics about brokers, message activity, etc., system level resources (CPU, RAM, Network, Disk, etc), and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) internal metrics from which users can gain insights into peak usage bottlenecks, performance and bottlenecks debugging, awareness of system resource utilization and trends, oversight of critical systems to prevent resource exhaustion that causes service outage, and capacity planning to handle future growth. Custom dashboards and alerting can also be set up easily in Grafana for better visibility and control over the Kafka system.

Aiven Kafka users now have greater control over topic management with the introduction of new features such as creating, modifying, and deleting topics over the Kafka protocol. The updates improve interoperability between Aiven Kafka service instances and Kafka ecosystem applications and tooling. Automatic topic creation is also added as an option, which can be enabled using the Aiven Command Line Client. These modifications are available for existing Kafka services by triggering a maintenance update from within the Aiven console, and all new Aiven Kafka deployments will automatically include these updates.

In the latest update to Aiven for PostgreSQL, version 10.3 has been released with new features that increase its functionality. The update includes support for TimescaleDB, a geographically distributed read replica feature in preview mode, and reduced prices for plans on AWS and DigitalOcean. Additionally, the business and premium plan extensions have been extended to cover more customer needs.