Reviewing the differences between Navigator and Apache Atlas helps you to know more about the features and functionalities available for metadata management in Apache Atlas.
Customers migrating from CDH with Navigator will be able to take advantage of these Atlas features:
Control data access in Ranger using Atlas metadata. Atlas classifications can control table, row, or column level access; Ranger can use Atlas classifications as the trigger to instruct services to mask data. See Configure Atlas Authorization using Ranger.
Reliability and scalability. Atlas uses Kafka to pass metadata and HBase and Solr to store it. See Apache Atlas architecture
Additional metadata sources. Atlas is flexible when it comes to adding metadata models for additional sources through REST APIs for metadata capture; it supports NiFi and Kafka metadata in addition to the sources integrated with Navigator. See Extending Atlas to manage metadata from additional sources.
After upgrading Cloudera Manager to CDP, Navigator continues to collect metadata and audit information from CDH cluster services. There are no changes to Navigator functionality; all Navigator data is retained in the Cloudera Manager.
Post upgrading of the CDH cluster to CDP, Navigator is recommended to be used only in the Read-only mode. No scheduling, updating of properties, and purging is recommended. If any scheduling is created, it must be disabled immediately.
After upgrading a CDH cluster, services that previously sent metadata and audit information to Navigator, such as Hive, Impala, Spark, and HBase, are configured to send metadata to Atlas. Navigator audit collection for those services is disabled. You can still access audit information and metadata through Navigator; however, Navigator will not collect new information from cluster services. When you have exhausted the value of the Navigator audit information and after you have converted Navigator metadata to Atlas content, you can disable Navigator servers.
