What's new in Edge Flow Manager

Edge Flow Manager (EFM) is a solution that enables you to manage, control, and monitor agents that are deployed on the edge devices in IoT implementations. You can use these agents to collect real-time data originating from the devices to create and push actionable intelligence and insights to the place of data origin.

Edge Flow Manager 1.4.0 is a feature release that contains performance improvements, bug fixes, and new features including:
  • Added agent management functionality.

    The main new functionality in this release allows the user to have more visibility and control over the agents themselves. It provides detailed agent information view along with command execution support against the agents. For more information, see the Managing agents in CEM section.

  • Elevated debug command functionality from technical preview to core feature set.

    You can now issue a DEBUG command against an agent which after executing the command uploads a debug bundle with logs, agent properties, and flow configuration so that you can more easily investigate issues. For more information, see the Managing agents in CEM section.

  • Added properties update command functionality.

    With this command it is possible to update agent specific properties through EFM. The update results in agent restart so the new updated properties are picked up at the startup. For more information, see the Managing agents in CEM section.

  • UI improvements on Monitoring/Dashboard and Edge Events views.
  • Dropped support for MySQL 5.6, 5.7 and PostgreSQL 9.x and added support for PostgreSQL 13.
  • Removed support for NiFi Registry integration.
    NiFi Registry integration was originally supported for the following use cases:
    • Designing flows outside of EFM
    • Saving a backup copy of flows designed from EFM

    However, both use cases are better supported without using NiFi Registry. Also, without using NiFi Registry, EFM gains the ability to import and export flows in many formats, which improves flow design portability. For restoring flows from backups, EFM database backup option offers a better experience compared to NiFi Registry backup option. Because, when reading from NiFi Registry to EFM, key metadata is lost and cannot be fully recovered. For this reason, in order to accelerate the EFM roadmap and offer you the best capabilities and experience, Cloudera deprecated in 1.3.0 and now removed the ability to write a copy of flows to NiFi Registry. Starting with EFM 1.3.0, Cloudera recommended that if you had enabled NiFi Registry integration, then disable it by setting the efm.nifi.registry.enabled property to false, in the efm.properties file, so that upgrades to future versions become more seamless.

For more information on bug fixes, see Fixed issues.