Third Party Components

Usage Engine optionally integrates with several different third-party applications and systems to add additional power to the platform. The most important are: 

• PostgreSQL – A powerful and commonly used system database for Usage Engine. It can be consumed as a service in a hyper scaler cloud environment, as an external on-prem installation or deployed alongside Usage Engine in the same or different Kubernetes cluster. 
• Oracle – Supported as an alternative to PostgreSQL for use as system database 
• Nginx (Or another Ingress Controller) - Used to manage ingresses, i.e., entry-points to HTTP-based solutions deployed in Usage Engine. 
• Prometheus – Powerful metrics subsystem which Usage Engine can push metrics directly to or provide over a REST API for Prometheus to scrape. Alongside Prometheus the Prometheus Adapter can be used to drive custom metric scaling, and Prometheus Alert Manager to manage alarms and alerts. 
• Grafana – Can be used to provide dashboards driven by the metrics in Prometheus. Usage Engine provides a default set of dashboards. 
• Fluentd – Can be used to collect all log files from the system and forward the to a single destination. 
• Elasticsearch – Can be used as a single destination for all log data to provide powerful search and filtering capabilities as well as more advanced features like machine learning.  
• Kibana – Can be used to provide a graphical UI to Elasticsearch. 
• Redis – Can be used as a distributed storage of aggregation or other payload data. 
• Couchbase – An alternative to Redis, providing similar functionality. 
• Cert-manager – Can be used to automate the process of generating and renewing certificates used for encrypted communication. 
• Jenkins / Gitlab / GitHub Actions (Or another CI tool) – Can be used to setup automated CI/CD pipelines to drive solution integration and deployment. 
• Jaeger – Usage Engine provides distributed tracing according to the OpenTracing standard where Jaeger can be used as a visualization tool for the traces. 
• Istio – Can be used to orchestrate service mesh architectures with Usage Engine. A particularly useful feature is the possibility to perform fine grained canary upgrades of online workflows. 
• Kiali – Can be used with Usage Engine and Istio to visualize traffic flows. 
• ArgoCD – Can be used to drive the CD part of an automated solution pipeline.