Not only is a new quarter upon us, but a (hopefully) brighter new year. What better way to kick off a new year than with a new MANTA release?!
As you plan out your 2022, our engineering team has added new technologies, enhancements, and capabilities to make the MANTA platform crucial in setting and achieving your data management goals.
Enhancements to Snowflake and Power BI Scanners
Release 35 brings several improvements and enhancements to existing scanners. After including support for COPY INTO attributes in Snowflake as part of Release 34, this release brings new capabilities to the Snowflake scanner.
Most significantly, we’ve added scanning support for transformation expressions, which are recognized by MANTA Active Tags and provide visibility for business rules across the data pipeline. This gives MANTA the ability to display business logic which is part of our Snowflake investment.
Release 35 also includes an update to the MANTA Power BI Scanner complementing Microsoft’s enhancements to the Power BI Admin API. This update provides for better access to metadata and linkage to underlying data sources, resulting in more complete data lineage.
Additionally, we’ve released a first implementation of lineage scanning for SAP Hana, which includes the automated collection of dictionary metadata and external script analysis via lineage parsing for independent SQL scripts in a separate sub-directory. With this implementation, MANTA is pleased to now be supporting this important technology as the newest addition to our portfolio of relational database scanners.
New Kafka Scanner
This release brings new scanners that will give a lift to other existing scanners. The new scanner for Kafka includes support for StreamSets and DataStage scanners. The Kafka scanner supports metadata harvesting from the Confluent registry and the ability to define a full Kafka server and topic hierarchy with a detailed metadata definition as described by Avro and JSON Schemas.
Enabled Event Notification
Release 35 introduces event management and notification with MANTA Event Framework. This functionality provides for a standardized format for important “events” that can be recognized throughout the MANTA platform and creates “messages” that are processed by the internal MANTA logging facility. This event-based notification equips crucial communications, meaning critical discoveries made by MANTA are now more easily highlighted—from notifying analytics resources that lineage metadata is available, to generating an alert if an important scan fails in the middle of the night. MANTA Event Framework includes built-in connectors for industry-standard notification methodologies.
Enhanced Identity Management and Configuration Settings
Besides these new capabilities, new scanners, and updated scanners, Release 35 includes equally important architecture changes to improve the overall support and management of the MANTA platform.
Integrated Keycloak Identity Management Solution
A new technology for user identity and access management is now integrated into the MANTA platform. Keycloak Identity Management Solution provides for improved security capabilities and enterprise-level support for user management, including single sign-on (SSO) for one user-ID access to all functions, enhanced user account management, active directory, and SAML integration.
Choice in Configuration Settings for Simplified Upgrade Process
Release 35 introduces changes to how site-specific settings and configurations for MANTA Flow are managed. User-set values have been separated from product-default settings. This choice of a user-set or product-based configuration simplifies and automates future MANTA upgrades as well as backups and migration of the configuration across environments.
Elevating the MANTA Experience
This is just some of what the MANTA engineering team has packed into Release 35. If you are a customer or partner, be sure to check out the release notes for a detailed breakdown of newly added features and enhancements to existing solutions.
Along with constantly improving MANTA with the latest capabilities, we continue our diligent commitment to quickly responding to vulnerabilities. The recently revealed security flaws in Log4j have impacted the entire industry. We responded to this issue immediately, making the needed patches available. We have ensured that Release 35 includes the required patches (Log4j 2.17) to resolve these vulnerabilities. Read more about our MANTA Apache Log4j2 vulnerability updates and response.
We’re off and running in 2022, so stay tuned—we’re already looking forward to the next release as we work to continually elevate your MANTA experience in 2022 and beyond.
Any questions, comments, thoughts? Want to schedule a demo to see MANTA in action? Drop us a line at manta@getmanta.com.