By bringing benefits of a fully managed service to self-managed environments, Confluent helps fix critical issues faster for always-on, real-time applications
Mountain View, Calif. – November 10, 2020 – Confluent, Inc., the event streaming pioneer, today announced the initial release of Proactive Support for Confluent Platform, which is a cloud service that intelligently identifies potential issues in Apache Kafka® environments before they occur, leading to faster resolution times. As a part of Project Metamorphosis – Reliable, Confluent aims to help any company make event streaming a pervasive part of their business without needing to make massive resource investments to keep Kafka running at peak performance. Proactive Support provides continuous, real-time analysis of cluster metadata and alerts organizations of potential issues. It also provides support engineers with key performance and health metrics to better understand their environments and identify the root cause of problems earlier. Now, organizations with self-managed environments get the benefit of a fully managed service so they can spend more time on innovation and less time on maintenance and firefighting.
“We built Proactive Support based on millions of hours of our collective Kafka expertise and extensive battle testing in Confluent Cloud,” said Jay Kreps, co-founder and CEO, Confluent. “Now, organizations using self-managed event streaming can benefit from SaaS-level reliability and ease of use, so they can keep their best people focused on building applications rather than fixing bugs.”
Due to the pandemic, digital adoption fast-forwarded several years in only a matter of weeks. For applications to have the real-time intelligence and speed consumers expect, Kafka and event streaming are the de facto standard. Since Kafka is the backbone of business-critical applications, lag or downtime can lead to critical business processes and applications failing. However, it is especially challenging to identify and solve problems in Kafka’s distributed, complex environment, often requiring organizations to dedicate a lot of time, resources, and expertise to deal with the issues.
Proactive Support Reduces the Risk of Downtime and Data Loss in Apache Kafka by Identifying Potential Issues Before They Happen
Confluent is bringing elements of its fully managed Kafka service Confluent Cloud to Confluent Platform to make the troubleshooting process more efficient and context driven. Proactive Support can help resolve Confluent Platform support tickets up to 25% faster and it offloads many of the manual steps required by customers to resolve an issue. With cluster metadata being continuously fed through an extensive library of expert-tested rules and algorithms, companies can quickly get insights to cluster performance and spot potential problems. And, support engineers no longer need to ask a long list of questions to try to identify a problem since they are already equipped with real-time health metrics.
Proactive Support is built on Confluent’s deep understanding of Kafka that is rooted in experience managing thousands of clusters in Confluent Cloud. Confluent has codified this expertise so even self-managed organizations can have reliable, highly durable event-driven applications and systems without the heavy lifting needed to Kafka run smoothly.
Today, Proactive Support can identify network and disk bottlenecks, which are some of the most common and costly issues organizations face when they scale. If the network or disks are overloaded, clusters will go down and critical business events can be lost. And to ensure complete visibility, organizations can customize the types of notifications they receive and integrate with Confluent Control Center via webhooks or choose to get notifications in Slack and email. Confluent is dedicated to providing the most durable, reliable, and highly available event streaming platform in the cloud and on premises, and will continue adding more intelligent rules and capabilities to Proactive Support next year.
Any customer using Confluent Platform 6.0 can opt in to use the initial release of Proactive Support.
For a deeper look into how Proactive Support works, check out our blog post.
Additional Resources
About Confluent Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®, pioneered the enterprise-ready event streaming platform. With Confluent, organizations benefit from the first event streaming platform built for the enterprise with the ease of use, scalability, security, and flexibility required by the most discerning global companies to run their business in real time. Companies leading their respective industries have realized success with this new platform paradigm to transform their architectures to streaming from batch processing, spanning on-premises and multi-cloud environments. Confluent is headquartered in Mountain View and London, with offices globally. To learn more, please visit www.confluent.io. Download Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud at www.confluent.io/download.
*The preceding outlines our general product direction and is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described may change.
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