What is Schema Monitoring and Atlas v0.27
Hi Everyone,
It's been a few weeks since our last release, and I'm very excited to share with you the news of Atlas v0.27. In this release, you will find:
- Atlas Schema Monitoring: A new product that provides a set of tools and features to help you manage and monitor your database schema effectively.
- Pay via AWS Marketplace: Atlas users can now pay for their Atlas subscription via the AWS Marketplace.
- Atlas HCL Doc Portal: A new portal that contains always up to date, automatically generated documentation for the Atlas HCL language.
Introducing Schema Monitoring
The hallmark of this release is a new product we call Atlas Schema Monitoring. Atlas Schema Monitoring provides a set of tools and features to help you manage and monitor your database schema effectively. Teams install an agent (container) on their database VPC which tracks changes to the database schema and reports metadata to the Atlas Cloud control plane. Using this metadata Atlas Schema Monitoring provides:
- Live visibility of your database schema with automated ER diagrams and auto-generated documentation.
- A Changelog of schema changes, so you can see how schemas change over time, and easily triage schema change related issues.
- Alerts Use Webhooks or Slack notifications to inform or alert teams that need to know about schema changes or drift.
Starting today, we are providng one free monitored instance to all signed up Atlas users.
A Live Demo is available for you to try out.
How it works
Atlas Cloud never has direct access to your database, instead it uses a middleman, the Atlas agent, to connect to your database instead. In order for this to work, the agent needs to be installed somewhere with network connectivity to the database, usually within the same VPC as the database. In addition, the agent should have outbound connectivity to your cloud account (e.g.,https://your-tenant.atlasgo.cloud).
The agent then starts polling Atlas Cloud for work. Once assigned a task, it connects to the database and executes the task, e.g. "take a snapshot" and then reports back the result to Atlas Cloud. The Agent does not read or report back any user data, only meta information about the database schema.
To read more about the key concepts and features of Atlas Schema Monitoring, head over to the Overview page.
Getting started
To get started with Schema Monitoring in under 5 minutes, head over to the Quickstart guide.
Security
Atlas Schema Monitoring is designed with the principle of minimal access in mind. The Atlas agent is designed to only require read-only access to the database schema and only requires access to system information schema tables and not user data.
Additionally, to provide further security and control, database credentials are never provided or stored in the Atlas Cloud control plane. Instead, the Atlas agent is deployed in your environment and connects to the database directly using a variety of secure methods.
To learn more about how to securely provide database credentials to the Atlas agent, head over to the Security and Credentials guide.
Pay via AWS Marketplace
Atlas users can now pay for their Atlas subscription via the AWS Marketplace. This is a great option for users who prefer to consolidate their billing and payments in one place or have AWS credits they would like to use.
To purchase Atlas quota via the AWS Marketplace, visit our Product Page.
Atlas HCL Doc Portal
Atlas enables users manage their database schema as code. One of the popular ways to define the desired state of your is via the Atlas HCL data definition language. Additionally, users have a powerful configuration language to define their project configuration.
We have added a new Atlas HCL Portal to the documentation website, which contains always up to date, automatically generated documentation for the Atlas HCL language.
Wrapping Up
That's all for this release! We hope you enjoy the new features and improvements. As always, we would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on our Discord server.
