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

• Environment Indicator

• Documentation Generator

Enhancements

• HTTP/2 Server Agent Supports Additional Certificate Validation

• Improved configuration options in the Streaming Telemetry Agent

• New icons

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 Usage Engine Private Edition 5.0! 

The key focus areas in this release are related to usability, productivity, and efficiency. It contains enhancements that simplify configuration management, improve visibility into system changes, streamline troubleshooting, and increase DevKit usability. With intuitive tools for comparing configurations, tracking changes, analyzing errors, and managing DevKit agents, you can work more efficiently while reducing manual effort and gaining deeper insights into your system. 

Some of the key features and enhancements are:  

Configuration Tracer 

The Configuration Tracer feature in the Desktop Online, is a powerful tool that you can use to track and manage configuration changes with ease. You can view both active configurations and historical versions, including those that have been deleted, 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. 

Added Functionality in Desktop Online 

In this release we have added the following functionality in Desktop Online, which was previously only available in Desktop Client: 

• 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. Configuration agent plugins can be done 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 quickly identify patterns and troubleshoot issues more effectively. 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. 

Enhancements

Other enhancements included are:

• HTTP/2 Client Agent Support new OAuth2UDR

• HTTP/2 Server Agent Supports Dynamic Public Key

• Running Authorization Server on ECD

All of these are explained in more detail in Usage Engine 5.0 Release.

The release can be accessed: Release Information.

Overall user documentation is available at: Usage Engine Documentation 5.0.

Enjoy! 🌟