On the 15th of April, Percona introduced the general availability of Percona Platform, and with that step, our company started a new, interesting period.
Popular questions we have received after this date include:
- What is Percona Platform, and how does it differ from Pecona Account?
- What is the difference between Percona Platform and Percona Portal?
- Why should Percona users connect to Percona Platform?
In this blog post, I will answer these questions and provide a summary of the benefits of a Percona Account.
What is Percona Platform, and how does it differ from Pecona Account?
First, let’s make sure we understand the following concepts:
Percona Platform – A unified experience for developers and database administrators to monitor, manage, secure, and optimize database environments on any infrastructure. It includes open source software and tools, access to Percona Expert support, automated insights, and self-service knowledge base articles.
Percona Account – A single login provides users with seamless access across all Percona properties, as well as insights into your database environment, knowledge base, support tickets, and guidance from Percona Experts. By creating a Percona Account, you get access to Percona resources like Forums, Percona Portal, ServiceNow (for current customers), and, in the future, other Percona resources (www.percona.com, Jira, etc.).
Percona Portal – One location for your Percona relationship, with a high-level overview of your subscription and key resources like the knowledge base, support tickets, and ability to access your account team from anywhere.
Next, let’s try to understand the complete flow users will have to go through when they decide to start using the Percona Platform. A Percona Account is foundational to Percona Platform. Users can create their own account here on Percona Portal. There are two options for Percona Account creation, either via an email and password or by using a social login from Google or Github.
What is the difference between Percona Platform and Percona Portal?
From the description above Percona Platform is a great experience in open source software, services, tools, and resources Percona is offering to all users. Percona Portal is just a part of Percona Platform and could be thought of as the core component of Percona Platform to discover the value Percona is offering to registered users.
Why should Percona users connect to Percona Platform?
Percona Platform brings together enterprise-ready distributions of MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB and a range of open source tools for database monitoring, backup, and management, making it easier to run complex database environments.
Percona Platform consists of several essential units:
- Percona Account,
- Percona Monitoring & Management, which can assure alerting, advisor insight for users’ environments, backups, private DBaaS, etc.
- Percona Portal,
- Support and services.
Percona Monitoring and Management, DBaaS
The heart of Percona Platform is Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), which provides the observability required to understand database health while offering actionable insights to remediate database incidents or performance issues.
PMM has already won the hearts of millions of DBAs around the world with its Query Analytics (QAN) and Advisors and now with Percona Platform release we made it even cooler!
The new technical preview feature that I’m talking about is Private DBaaS.
With less than 20 minutes to configure, Percona Private DBaaS enables you to provide self-service databases to your internal teams in any environment.
Percona Private DBaaS enables Developers to create and manage database clusters through familiar UI and well-documented API, providing completely open source and ready-to-use clusters with MySQL or MongoDB that contain all necessary Kubernetes settings. Each cluster is set up with high availability, load balancing, and essential monitoring and management.
Private DBaaS feature of PMM is free from vendor lock-in and does not enforce any cloud or on-prem infrastructure usage restrictions.
Learn more about DBaaS functionality in our Documentation
Percona Portal
Percona Portal is a simple UI to check and validate your relationship with Percona software and services. Stay tuned for updates.
To start getting the value from Percona Portal, just create an organization in the Portal and connect Percona Monitoring & Management using a Percona account. Optionally, you can also invite other members to this group in order to share a common view of your organization, any PMM connection details, a list of current organization members, etc.
When existing Percona customers create their accounts with corporate email, Percona Portal already knows about their organization. They are automatically added as members and can see additional details about their account, like opened support tickets, entitlements, and contact details.
Percona Account and SSO
Percona Platform is a combination of open source software and services. You can start discovering software advantages right from installing PMM and start monitoring and managing your environments. You could ask yourself what role of the Platform connection is there? Let’s briefly clarify this.
SSO is the first advantage you should see upon connecting your PMM instance to Percona Platform. All users in the organization are able to sign in to PMM using their Percona Account credentials. They also will be granted the same roles in PMM and Portal. For example, if a user is an admin on Percona Portal, they do not need to create a new user in PMM, but will instead be automatically added as an admin in PMM. Portal Technical users will be granted a Viewer role in PMM.
Let’s assume a Percona Platform user has already created an account, has his own organization with a couple of members in it, and has also connected PMM to the Platform with a Percona Account. Then, he is also able to use SSO for the current organization.
Percona Advisors
Advisors provide automated insights and recommendations within Percona Monitoring and Management, ensuring your database performs at its best. Constantly evolving with technology and user feedback, the Advisors check for:
- Availability at risk,
- Replication inconsistencies,
- Durability at risk,
- Passwordless users,
- Unsecure connections,
- Unstable OS configuration,
- Available performance improvements and more.
Advisors workflow consists of the following:
- If the user has just started PMM and set up monitoring of some databases and environments, we provide him with a set of basic Advisors. To check the list the user should go to the Advisors section in PMM.
- After the user connects PMM and Platform on Percona Portal, this list gets bigger and the set of advisors is updated.
- The final step happens with a Percona Platform subscription. If a user subscribes to Percona Platform, we provide the most advanced list of Advisors, which cover a lot of edge cases and check database environments.
See the full list of Advisors and various tiers in our documentation here.
As an open source company, we are always eager to engage the community and invite them to innovate with us.
Here you can find the developer guides on how to create your own Advisors.
How to register a Percona Account?
There are several options to create a Percona account. The first way is to specify your basic data – email, last name, first name, and password.
- Go to “Don’t have an account? Create one” on the landing page for Percona Portal.
- Enter a minimal set of information (work email, password, first and last name), confirm that you agree with Percona’s Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy agreement, and hit Create.
To complete your registration, check your email and follow the steps provided there. Click the confirmation link in order to activate your account. You may see messages coming from Okta, this is because Percona Platform uses Okta as an identity provider.
- After you have confirmed your account creation, you can log in to Percona Portal.
You can also register a Percona Account if you already have a Google or Github account created.
When you create a Percona account with Google and Github, Percona will store only your email and authenticate you using data from the given identity providers.
- Make sure you have an account on Google/Github.
- On the login page, there are dedicated buttons that will instruct you to confirm account information usage by Percona.
- Confirm you are signing in to your account if 2FA for your Google is enabled.
- Hurray! Now you have an active account on Percona Portal.
The next option to register a Percona Account is to Continue with Github. The process is similar to Google.
- An important precondition has to be met prior to account usage and registration: Set your email address in Github to Public.
- From Settings, go to the Emails section and uncheck the Keep my email address private option. These settings will be saved automatically. If you do not want to change this option in Github, so you could use other accounts like Google, or create your own with email.
- If you already registered an account, you are ready to go with Percona Portal. Use your Google/Github credentials every time you log in to your account.
Conclusions
Start your Percona Platform experience with Percona Monitoring & Management – open source database monitoring, management, and observability solution for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.
Set up Percona Monitoring and Management (version >2.27.0) following PMM Documentation.
The next step is to start exploring Percona Platform and get more value and experience from Percona database experts by creating a Percona Account on Percona Portal. The key benefits of Percona Platform include:
- A Percona Account as a single authentication mechanism to use across all Percona resources,
- Access to Percona content like blogs and forums, knowledge base.
- Percona Advisors that help optimize, manage and monitor database environments.
Once you create a Percona account, you will get basic advisors, open source software, and access to community support and forums.
When connecting Percona Monitoring and Management to Percona Account you will get a more advanced set of advisors for your systems security, configuration, performance, and data design.
Percona Platform subscription is offering even more advanced advisors for Percona customers and also a fully supported software experience, private DBaaS, and an assigned Percona Expert to ensure your success with the Platform.
Please also consider sharing your feedback and experience with Percona on our Forums.
Visit Percona Platform online help to view Platform-related documentation, and follow our updates on the Platform what’s new page.
