Percona Customer Portal and Your New, Free User Account

Google, Microsoft, and Apple have it. So do open source organizations like MongoDB, Red Hat, and SUSE. What do all these companies provide? A customer portal that enables anyone to create an identity with the company. To date, Percona hasn’t had a customer portal with a free user account –  but that’s about to change.

Starting with the 2.10.0 release of Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) and rolling out in stages, Percona is introducing the ability for anyone to create a free Percona customer portal user account. In the immediate term, users will access the page to create their accounts from either within PMM or at https://platform.percona.com.

I’m sure you’re asking… “why would I want to create a free user account with Percona?” I’m going to answer that question from the end-state, long-term goal perspective, and then work backward to the short-term.

Percona envisions a customer portal that any registered user would access after login. This customer portal would be personalized for each account user and contain elements relevant to them as an individual as well as part of a larger organization. Some personalized information on this portal would include:

• Content: based on the preferences you set, personalized content would be accessible via this portal. If you were most interested in content related to a database technology (MySQL, MongoDB, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL), new blog posts would be pushed to the content section of your customer portal related to that technology. Or perhaps you want to subscribe to content relating to particular functionality (e.g., backup strategies, best practices in alert notifications, etc.).
• Training: like the content topic above, Percona’s database experts produce training content from webinars to videos and other educational materials relating to database technologies, database best practices, tuning tips and tricks, etc. Within your customer portal account, you would be able to subscribe to training content personalized to your preferences.
• Subscriptions: if your organization has purchased a support contract or services from Percona, the portal would provide you with details about that subscription as appropriate for each user and defined in permissions (i.e., duration, end date, entitlements, scope, renewal information, etc.).
• Support: via your account login, you would have access to the Percona support tickets you (and, based on permissions, others within your organization) opened and the status of those tickets.
• Single Sign-On: this single account/password combination will allow you to access all Percona properties without the need to register/maintain multiple accounts to ask a question on forums, comment on a blog post, suggest a correction to documentation, register for a webinar, and much more!
• Intelligence: with decades of expertise and best practices, Percona is building additional tools that leverage this knowledge to help users and customers more quickly and easily optimize and secure their database environments. This may include security threat tool checks to examine the security vulnerabilities of your database environment or advisors to provide recommendations on optimizing current configurations, diagnostics, issue remediation, and other capabilities.

As you can see, Percona has big plans for the future customer portal and your new user account to access that portal. We hope you agree that it makes sense to create a new user account to take advantage of these offerings.

As stated above, we are introducing the user account in version 2.10.0 of PMM. In the beginning, the capabilities of this account and its associated customer portal will be limited. But, the functionality will grow over time until the vision of the above capabilities is realized within the customer portal. And, we welcome your ideas and suggestions to make the customer portal even more useful and dynamic. By creating your free user account, we will be able to provide you a more custom-tailored experience beginning with more relevant/enhanced security checks to your currently running environment.

Version 2.10.0 of PMM goes well beyond just the introduction of the customer portal and free user account, though. The following highlights are also included in this new PMM release:

New MongoDB Exporter

When PMM either warns about an impending potential issue and/or detects an issue requiring immediate attention relating to a MongoDB database, you, as someone that needs to get to the bottom of this issue, need to have access to data about this issue and how to take action to remediate and resolve the issue. PMM’s new MongoDB exporter provides a much-improved set of exported data to enable that richer exploration of the issue for quick resolution without requiring user-driven modification of the exporter.

Upgrade of Grafana to v7.1 (from v6.4)

New user interface look and components to improve overall usability also enabling Percona to brand PMM more prominently and de-emphasize Grafana branding. Added time zone support for better personalization. Introduction of search functionality in query history, enabling search across queries and your comments.

Group Replication Dashboard

Dashboard support to present MySQL group replication metrics and statuses, which enables the creation of elastic, highly-available, fault-tolerant replication topologies, guaranteeing that the database service is continuously available.

pt-summary on Node Summary dashboard

Bringing back this PMM1 functionality, which enabled a user to see the results of pt-summary output on the PMM user interface. This tool provided a lot of useful information regarding the system and parameters. Within PMM2, the newly added support for pt-summary output is conveniently placed on the Node dashboard to provide a more well-rounded view of the user system.

Percona Monitoring and Management 2.10.0 is available now so grab the latest version and update today.  Let us know what additional functionality we could enable with your new account!

by Brandon Fleisher via Percona Database Performance Blog