As every quarter, our development team is bringing you a shiny new version of MANTA. The 3.29 release is packed with new scanners, features, and enhancements, so let’s review what you can look forward to in this release.
New Scanners
Our technology stack is something we are really proud of, and we are always hungry for more scanners and integrations. We have a few new scanners available for testing: StreamSets, SAP Business Object, and Custom Script Scanner.
StreamSets is a new technology added to the MANTA scanner roster—streaming. Streaming is more oriented toward transactional data and real-time data feeding.
SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is a reporting tool. Support for this tool is extremely important to users looking to increase trust in their reporting, know the data sources used for reports, and make better business decisions.
Our new Custom Script Scanner expands the ability to establish custom metadata, particularly within scripts. We have kept in mind those developers who work with scripting languages or lineage for particular processes, even if the technology they work with is not automatically scanned by MANTA.
Just a reminder: If a scanner is ready for testing, that means we are looking for pioneers willing to try our new capabilities before anyone else. If you want to become a pioneer, let us know. Quite a few customers are waiting to get their hands on new scanners, so you had better be quick!
When it comes to existing scanners, we have made major advancements in HiveQL and Java, which will allow their users to fully benefit from MANTA’s unified lineage.
We’ve also improved transformation processing performance and the extended transforming and non-transforming properties for ETL, resulting in smarter filtering and making lineage easier to understand and consume. We also display only critical stages during transformations, to avoid information overload.
Integrations
We are always happy to team up with vendors who share our vision of augmented data management to provide comprehensive lineage solutions. This time we have something that Collibra users will surely appreciate—a hyperlink that will let them easily return to MANTA from Collibra to access detailed lineage without experiencing disruption.
Infrastructure
Good news for those who are writing their own portals and applications and want to illustrate lineage as presented in MANTA. There is a new permalink REST API call that provides even more flexible methods to move seamlessly between any application and MANTA without the need to log out/in to access the MANTA lineage diagram.
We are also introducing new custom filters, adjusted to your needs. You can now filter elements, for example, by a particular schema, excluding some tables. It is now possible to perform complex logic and use custom filters to serve your individual needs. With MANTA the sky is the limit.
We’ve also added some alert windows to make your life easier—whenever you need to share or back up a MANTA Flow dump, MANTA will warn you if it’s too big to do so.
MANTA’s New Colors
Not only do we make sure that everything is working as it should on the backend but we also do what we can to make lineage simpler and more consumable. We’ve made it easier to see how many tables or stored procedures a child element contains—you don’t have to expand it anymore, you’ll see the number of assets next to the child element now. The admin user interface got a makeover too—now there are new ways to configure and establish lineage.
What else is new? A color scheme. It’s not easy to support as many technologies as we do and not run out of colors! Now our users can color their assets in the diagram by the type of asset, not the technology itself: for example, a database asset or an ETL asset.
These examples are just a small taste of our new color scheme. Try it out and let us know what you think. We would love to hear your feedback!
MANTA 3.29 contains the first batch of admin UI improvements—you can look forward to more of those in upcoming releases. Our goal is to simplify the management of connections, licensing, and logging. Now, you’ll see three tabs in your admin UI: Connections, Configuration, and Updater. Users can choose if they want to see more basic or advanced attributes of the configuration. We’ve also added connection validation messages. The way that connections are displayed has also changed—only existing connections are visible in the menu, making it easier for you to find what you are looking for.
We’ve also added support for LDAP and SSO. You can now decide which security mode should be used and then complete the configuration in UI, saving you the hassle of going through the configuration files.
You will also see a whole new page containing information about your MANTA license that is currently in use. You’ll see the number of scripts that have already been analyzed by MANTA to avoid confusion regarding how many scripts you have remaining.
From now on, MANTA updater will also let you know what to do in case of conflicts in the configuration—a new instruction page will appear with everything you need to know to successfully complete the update.
Security
As always, we are making MANTA as secure as possible. We know that you can’t compromise on security capabilities. We have tightened our code and shut the door on several recently identified industry-wide loopholes in XML processing. We’ve also increased support for SSO (single sign-on)—users can safely get into MANTA without reissuing their credentials after logging in to their machines.
We are truly proud that we can provide you with so many wonders in our 3.29 release, and we are looking forward to your feedback! There are also great new features waiting in the wings for the next release, so stay tuned!
Any questions? Want to become a pioneer? Write to us at manta@getmanta.com.