Managing Performance in Liferay DXP: An Overview of Liferay Connected Services
Executive Summary Liferay Connected Services (LCS) is an online platform that helps our customers successfully manage their Liferay projects. The tools and services in LCS enable customers to monitor performance, automatically install necessary fix packs, easily migrate servers to or from environments, manage subscriptions and improve Disaster Recovery plans through self-provisioning. Even better, the features of LCS work regardless of whether your Liferay DXP instance is on a single discreet server or distributed across a cluster. With one tool, you re able to service all parts of your Liferay DXP instance. LCS is included in your Enterprise Subscription and allows you to forego sharing your server details with Liferay. Instead, you securely connect to LCS and access all of your management tools from a self-service dashboard. LCS Dashboard Features The online LCS Dashboard is the primary way users interact with their Liferay DXP subscriptions and instances, and it is a powerful tool that allows users to access information about their different environments in one place. The features that customers find most useful are Performance Metrics, Fix Pack Management and Web Notifications. LCS Dashboard View 1
Performance Metrics LCS provides a free, lightweight monitoring system to help users understand platform performance and detect performance issues. Some of the core measurements users can view include: Page Visits Application Load Times Memory Metrics JVM and Garbage Collector Health Indicators Additionally, the dashboard has a Project, Environment and Server View, where you can view settings, available fix packs and status notifications. By offering you a proactive way to monitor your platform, LCS allows you to go into your system and see exactly what s going on in near real-time, rather than finding out from a third-party that something has broken. LCS Performance Metrics Fix Pack Management Managing enterprise software can be a challenging task, especially when you are applying updates or fixes across multiple servers and environments. Through LCS, our customers can immediately receive security updates and bug fixes that are crucial for most projects. The dashboard allows you to apply these updates across several servers and clusters through a single online process. 2
Once you log into the LCS dashboard, you can quickly check which fix pack is currently installed. Administrators can set permission restrictions to control who is able to see fix pack information in LCS. The dashboard will also indicate when a fix pack is ready to be installed. LCS Fix Pack Management Web Notifications LCS also displays web notifications that you can view by clicking the bell icon next to the user menu in the Dockbar. Here, you can view notifications sent by Liferay Support, as well as those generated by LCS. You can also set up email alerts for different events according to your preferences, such as for a server shutting down or cluster nodes breaking. LCS Web Alerts 3
Subscription Management Another benefit of LCS is the ability to manage your Liferay DXP subscriptions. By assigning an environment to a subscription type and then registering a Liferay DXP server in that environment, your server consumes one activation key from that subscription type. You can also view your project s available subscriptions and see how they re being used. Elastic Subscriptions A new feature of LCS allows you to register and manage elastic environments through elastic subscriptions. Elastic subscriptions can support auto-scaling environments, where the number of required servers or instances can change throughout the year as traffic fluctuates. It can also be used to stand up additional servers on a temporary basis; for example, to support business continuity planning. LCS is required to manage and track elastic subscriptions. LCS Availability Because LCS is deployed on a global cloud infrastructure that has been set up for automatic failure recovery, the potential for non-availability is very low. In the event of an outage, registered Liferay DXP instances maintain a local copy of their uptime information to transmit to LCS when it comes back online. Active Liferay DXP subscriptions also have a seven-day grace period to re-establish connectivity and remain valid. This is ample time for LCS to come back online. Should an extended LCS outage occur, Liferay support can provide temporary subscription keys that don t require LCS. Security Liferay DXP and LCS are used across many industries with stringent security requirements, such as government, insurance, banking and healthcare. Liferay understands that connecting to external servers and sharing performance data can be a difficult proposition for some enterprise contexts. Therefore, we have taken the following steps to ensure that our users can know their connections to LCS are secure. 1. LCS is hosted using industry standard best practices for maintaining firewalls and ensuring authorized access and login. 2. All communications between your servers and LCS will occur over HTTPS (SSL) and will be 100% encrypted. 4
3. All communications to the LCS servers can be configured to use a proxy server, avoiding any additional customer firewall holes. 4. All data stored in LCS is logically partitioned to ensure that each Liferay customer s data is segmented and cannot be retrieved by other Liferay customers accessing the system via the LCS dashboard and API mechanisms. 5. To protect your users privacy, LCS only stores system-specific data. LCS doesn t gather or store data on your users. To offer the best service possible, LCS stores the following information about your servers: Patches installed on each server portal.properties (except sensitive data) JVM metrics Portal and portlet metrics Cache and server metrics Basic information of server installation environment, such as OS, database type and Java version If required, customers can disable the metrics and analytics services and only use LCS to manage their subscriptions. Subscription validation is the only LCS feature that cannot be disabled by LCS users. Deployment Architecture Components Highly regulated IT environments (e.g., banks, insurance companies, defense contractors, etc) allow servers to communicate with external systems using an authenticated proxy server. Your LCS connection can be configured to communicate via your IT s authenticated proxy servers over HTTPS. The below diagram represents the typical architecture of an LCS deployment. Liferay DXP LCS Client LCS Gateway Customer Firewall LCS Firewall Proxy Server Other LCS Services 5
The first three boxes, from left to right, represent the customer s Liferay DXP instance, proxy server and firewall: The LCS Client, an app within a Liferay instance, establishes a communication channel to LCS. This is how a Liferay DXP instance pushes data to and pulls responses from LCS. The Proxy Server provides external network access to outside resources. This can be authenticated or unauthenticated according to your needs. The proxy server is audited and controlled by the customer. All communication with LCS passes through the customer s firewall before communicating externally, ensuring that all further security requirements are met. The above precautions and considerations around security address the vast majority of enterprise use cases of LCS. If you have specific questions about your infrastructure or specific security questions, please send an email to sales@liferay.com, and a Liferay expert will discuss any remaining questions with you. 6
Conclusion Liferay Connected Services makes the process of updating and managing your Liferay DXP instances much easier than it has been in the past. The comprehensive dashboard allows users to quickly view the status of their servers, apply relevant fix packs and view key performance metrics. With the increasing pressure in business to move faster and automate processes, the traditional method of managing enterprise software is simply too slow. By turning this time-consuming process into a straightforward self-service dashboard, your team is free to focus on other business priorities, without sacrificing the critical maintenance and management of your platform. In addition, LCS will deliver advanced machine learning capabilities that can help warn your Liferay platform administrators of potential performance and system stability regressions, thus proactively warning and identifying potential optimizations for you to take advantage of. Moving Forward Liferay Connected Services is included in the Liferay Enterprises Subscription, a full package of support, maintenance and legal assurance for enterprises. Learn more about how you can benefit from a subscription by contacting us at sales@liferay.com. Already a Liferay customer? Get started with LCS by signing in with your Liferay account. lcs.liferay.com 7
Liferay makes software that helps companies create digital experiences on web, mobile and connected devices. The Liferay platform is open source, which makes it more reliable, innovative and secure. Companies such as Carrefour, Coach, Danone, Fujitsu, Lufthansa Aviation Training, Siemens, Société Générale, VMware and the United Nations use Liferay. Learn more at liferay.com. 2018 Liferay, Inc. All rights reserved. 180105