Welcome to InfoZone
DigitalRoute AI Assistant is now available for select customers.
Please email ai-assistant@digitalroute.com to show your interest,
and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Blog Posts
During the last quarter, we have released the following new features and enhancements:
New Features
Introducing the Date function
With the Date function, you can add, modify, and transform date-time values in your data. It can be used for reformatting dates, for example, converting YYYY/MM to YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss, creating new date fields, copying and editing existing date fields, or adjusting dates by adding or subtracting time units, such as days, hours, or minutes. This function is designed to make date-handling in your streams more flexible and consistent. See https://infozone.atlassian.net/wiki/x/cAB6Hw.
Annotations
One of the main challenges in developing a stream is maintaining any form of documentation on its purpose. Streams can have varying complexities, and can be built through a shared custody with a team rather than a single developer. Therefore, a stream’s complexity may require thorough context and descriptions for every moving part in the stream that has to be communicated with every custodian, whether it is to maintain or troubleshoot the stream, or to make enhancements or upgrades for better operations.
With the new Annotation features, you can add annotations directly to a stream. You can enter a high-level description, outlining the stream’s purpose and logic and other relevant details in a text box on the canvas. You can also add annotations to function groups, which are collections of related functions within the stream. This allows you to provide context, logical grouping, or usage notes specific to those grouped functions, improving clarity around complex operations. The annotations can be color coded for better readability.
By providing context directly within the stream editor, annotations significantly enhance collaborative stream development by embedding clear, and contextual documentation , at both the stream and function group levels, that can be exported and imported between streams. See Annotations.
Enhancements
NDJSON File Format Support in File Forwarders
The NDJSON (Newline Delimited JSON) file format is now supported in file forwarders, in addition to the standard JSON file format that has been available by default. NDJSON enables efficient forwarding of structured data to cloud storage, making it easier to manage and process large datasets. This enhancement is available within the Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and SFTP forwarders, providing greater flexibility and improved data handling for your workflows.
Custom fields included in the Usage metering API
In Usage metering, you can now add custom fields, like customer ID or address, when you create or update a meter using the API. These custom fields are stored with each meter and included in the final output. You can add, update, or remove custom fields at any time through the API. When the meter data is processed, the custom fields are part of the metered output and can be sent directly to other systems. This enables direct integration with downstream systems, such as billing, without needing additional enrichment steps. See https://infozone.atlassian.net/wiki/x/qwJoDQ.
Enhanced options for handling invalid records in the Validate function
The Validate function now includes an optional additional output, making it easier to manage invalid records in streams. With this enhancement, you can send invalid records to another function in the stream, forward them to Data Correction, or do both. The option to discard invalid records is still available, as before. These new choices provide greater flexibility for handling data quality issues within streams. See https://infozone.atlassian.net/wiki/x/edZ3.
🌟
We hope you enjoy these new enhancements. As always, we appreciate your feedback. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us through our Self Service Portal.
We are excited to announce the release and general availability of Usage Engine Private Edition 5.1!
The key focus areas in this release are optimizing productivity, efficiency, security, and compliance, including new features and enhancements related to usability, integration, and interoperability.
This release also includes deployment-focused enhancements for scalable batch workflows, enabling greater flexibility in secure, policy-driven environments without compromising performance.
Some of the key features and enhancements are:
Kafka Batch Transaction Handler – Manual Topic Configuration
With this feature, you can create and configure existing Kafka topics in the Kafka Batch Transaction Handler, complementing the existing default behavior of auto-creating topics. It improves deployment flexibility, especially in environments with strict data center compliance policies, by allowing more controlled topic management.
You can now configure topic names directly via system properties or in the workflow execution settings, where the Kafka profile is selected.
To ensure backward compatibility, default topic names match the current auto-created ones, so existing workflows continue to function without changes. The manual configuration is optional. A validation mechanism checks topic availability at workflow startup, reducing the risk of runtime errors due to misconfiguration or missing topics.
This capability facilitates onboarding for secure, managed environments while preserving the scalability and performance behavior of Kafka-based batch transactions.
Manual topic creation for scalable Inter Workflow
With this feature you can create topics manually for the Scalable Inter Workflow agents, allowing you to define and name your own Kafka topics for forwarding and collection. This is an added functionality to the existing auto-creation behavior.
Manual topic creation follows a guided process where you refer to documented topic requirements and naming conventions, create the topics in Kafka, and configure them in Usage Engine via the standard configuration process. The system supports validation of topic configuration, either through a “Try” button or at workflow startup, ensuring the topics are correctly set up before runtime. In Desktop you are also provided with code snippets that you can copy when creating your topics.
ECS Inspector in Desktop Online
The ECS Inspector in Desktop Online brings the powerful ECS inspection capabilities from the Desktop Client. This feature enables you to inspect, edit, and manage UDRs and batches stored in the ECS, ensuring data integrity and enabling corrective actions without restarting upstream processes. You can view detailed record content, apply controlled edits where needed, and assign data to Reprocessing Groups, making it available for re-processing via ECS collection agents.
This feature also supports user-defined metadata, such as custom error codes or cancellation messages, enhancing traceability and diagnostic clarity. By streamlining error handling and improving visibility into ECS data, the ECS Inspector in Desktop Online help you maintain high processing accuracy and operational efficiency within complex data mediation environments.
The bulk edit and restricted field features are currently only available in Desktop Client. These features will be made available in Desktop Online in a coming release.
Keyboard Shortcuts/Context Menu - Part 1
Keyboard shortcuts and context menus have been added in the Configuration Browser and the code editors of Usage Engine, which improves usability and efficiency by enabling streamlined right-click actions and keyboard shortcuts for frequent tasks.
You can quickly perform actions such as cut, copy, paste, delete, rename, or encrypt, as well as finding function definitions and showing usage of defined functions. Redundant actions have been removed to enhance clarity, and additional keyboard shortcuts support faster, more accessible workflows.
This feature will help you manage large and complex configuration sets with greater speed, accuracy, and consistency.
New Features
Usability
Enhancements
HTTP/2 Server Agent Supports Additional Certificate Validation
Improved configuration options in the Streaming Telemetry Agent
All of these are explained in more detail in Usage Engine 5.1 Release.
The release can be accessed: Release Information .
Overall user documentation is available at: Usage Engine Documentation 5.1 .
Enjoy! 🌟
We are excited to announce the release and general availability of MediationZone 9.4!
The key focus areas in this release are related to usability, productivity, and operational clarity. It introduces enhancements that simplify configuration management, improve visibility into system behavior, streamline error analysis, and increase development efficiency. With intuitive tools for tracking and comparing configurations, navigating faster using context menus and keyboard shortcuts, analyzing ECS errors visually, and inspecting data directly within Desktop, you can work more efficiently, reduce manual effort, and gain deeper insights into your system.
Some of the key features and enhancements are:
Configuration Tracer
The Configuration Tracer feature in Desktop is a powerful tool for tracking and managing configuration changes. You can view both active configurations and historical versions, including deleted ones, providing full visibility into configuration history. This will improve troubleshooting, compliance, change management, and operational efficiency.
With the possibility to restore deleted configurations, you can quickly recover important designs and maintain system integrity. It also provides detailed metadata, including ownership, access permissions, version history, and references to related configurations, offering a comprehensive audit trail for traceability purposes.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The usability and efficiency in the Configuration Browser have been improved with the addition of right-click actions and keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. You can quickly perform actions such as cut, copy, paste, delete, rename, encrypt, and open configurations or folders, reducing the amount of manual navigation and repetitive clicks.
The context menu dynamically adapts to single or multi-selection, and new configurations are saved to the selected folder by default, ensuring logical organization. Redundant actions have been removed to enhance clarity, and additional keyboard shortcuts support faster, more accessible workflows.
Tab Titles and Environment Indication
Tab Titles and Environment Indication enhances clarity when you are working across multiple environments by displaying the value of the mz.name parameter directly in tab titles. This reduces the risk of cross-environment mistakes and improves context awareness during daily operations. While the default value remains “DR,” the parameter can now be customized to reflect environment-specific identifiers, with constraints on length, truncation, and allowed characters to be documented and enforced.
Though rarely changed after installation, upcoming validation logic in install scripts and tools like Topo will ensure consistency. Additionally, mz.name continues to support uniqueness in config key names and system exports, maintaining clarity and traceability across configurations.
Added Functionality in Desktop Online
In this release, we have added the following functionality in Desktop, which was previously only available in Legacy Desktop:
Configuration Diff – for easy comparison of configurations with visually highlighted differences, enhancing troubleshooting, auditing, and overall system reliability.
DevKit – for creating and using your own DevKit plugins with associated documentation available using the Help button. Agent plugins can be used directly in the workflow editor, and with the notifier plugins, you get a centralized interface for managing notifications, improving efficiency.
ECS Statistics – for a clear and comprehensive view of error code distributions, helping you to quickly identify patterns and troubleshoot issues more efficiently. Pie charts display error codes, offering clear visibility into the most frequent and impactful issues; and numerical values within the chart further enhance clarity, making it easier to interpret data at a glance, strengthening error analysis, system monitoring, and operational efficiency.
ECS Inspector - for inspecting, editing, and managing UDRs and batches stored in the ECS, helping you ensure data integrity and take corrective actions without restarting upstream processes. You can view detailed record content, assign data to Reprocessing Groups for reprocessing via ECS collection agents, and apply user-defined metadata such as custom error codes or cancellation messages to enhance traceability and diagnostic clarity.
Upgrade Support
A direct upgrade from MediationZone 8.3 to 9.4, without requiring stepwise upgrades through intermediate versions, is supported in this release, and documentation for this procedure is available. The documentation includes specific instructions for this upgrade path to ensure compatibility and a consistent upgrade process.
This exception has been put in place to enable customers to more easily upgrade to the latest version to take the best advantage of newer features and simplify the development and management of the platform.
We encourage you to explore all the detailed features and enhancements below to gain a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities in MediationZone 9.4:
New Features
Usability
Additional Functionality Made Available in Desktop
Integration and Monitoring
Enhancements
HTTP/2 Improvements
Usability Improvements
Documentation Improvements
Other Improvements
All of these are explained in more detail in MediationZone 9.4 Release .
Information about where the release can be accessed is available here: Release Information.
Overall user documentation is available at: https://infozone.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MD94.
Enjoy! 🌟
Support
If you need to get in contact with our Support desk, please see our Support Web User Guide.