Intro to Neo4j Ops Manager (NOM)

1. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Intro to Neo4j Ops Manager
(NOM)
Graph Connect, June 2022
Richard Macaskill
Costa Alexoglou

2. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Richard Macaskill
Introducing myself
Product Manager
Neo4j
Core Database Team
@datamacas

3. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
The current challenge
● Graph database adoption is growing >20% annually
● Hybrid deployments in clouds and on premises
● Neo4j continues to grow in features and functions

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The current challenge
● Data size is exploding
○ Database size has grown from GB to TB and even PB
○ Neo4j is being scaled out as clusters
● Pressure on IT Leaders and DBAs to
○ Deliver and maintain applications on time and on budget
○ Pressure to increase productivity
○ Technical resources are expensive in a tight labour market

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Previous/Existing options
3rd Party Monitoring tools
• Require setup and integration; separate licenses and support contracts
• Resulting charts and reports are not within Neo4j context
Command line interface for administration and operations
• Requires familiarity with graph concepts, deployment topology, and
Cypher
• Learning curve can be steep for DBAs new to Neo4j
No single place to monitor, administer, and operate your Neo4j estate

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The Perfect World
At the push of a
button, view the
statuses of all Neo4j
databases, clusters, and
instances.
View the health metrics of each
Neo4j database and also of the
resources where it is deployed
Create databases, configure
and administer them at scale
without first having to master
the graph language.
Put important but mundane tasks
such as scheduled jobs, backup /
restore, upgrades on autopilot
Evaluate and monitor
query performance. Use
recommendations to fine
tune performance

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Administration
The Solution
Pre-integrated, turnkey
Monitoring for all Neo4j
installations in your estate
Status at a glance
Metrics dashboard
Neo4j at scale, from 1 place
Cloud or on-prem
Single instance or clusters
Monitoring
Administration
Security management
* forward looking

8. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved 2021
8
Increased
Productivity
● Faster ramp-up of
new DBAs / SREs / Dev
Ops
● Easier to create /
configure databases*
● Simpler maintenance
of instances and
clusters
● Less or same
overhead
What you gain: large scale Neo4j with less headache
Improved
Reliability
● Faster issue detection
in database or
machines
● Monitor health
metrics out of the box
and within Neo4j
context
Optimized
Performance*
● Evaluation and
recommendations for
faster Neo4j queries
● Recommendations
for more efficient
schema
* Forward looking

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Architecture
Principles
- Loose coupling with APIs
- Thin Client (Web Browser)
Feature Frameworks
- Metadata driven
- Knowledge Engine
- Intelligent Monitoring

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© 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Hands on/Demo

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🙋🏻♂️
Hi! I’m Costa Alexoglou
Senior Software Engineer at Neo4j

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Agenda
1. Demo Setup
2. What is an agent
3. Monitoring your Neo4j Infra
4. Speed up the Operations
5. Registering an agent

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Demo Setup

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What is an agent
1. Small Golang executable
2. Monitors OS and Neo4j
related metrics
3. Solves the firewall problem

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Monitoring your Neo4j Infra
Demo time 🎉

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Demo for
1. Login
2. Home Page
3. Status Panel
4. Dashboard
5. Alerts

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How the demo is set up
- NOM server with single instance Neo4j DBMS persistence
- Already running
- 1 x 3 core cluster already registered and managed by agent
- (agent/instances online)
- 1 x single instance already registered and managed by agent
- (agent/instance down)
- Some data loading scripts which can be run on the managed DBMS(s)
- Additional instance ready to join cluster as read-only during the demo

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What the demo/workshop will cover
NOM in action: a walkthrough of the GUI
● Home Page
● Status Panel
● Dashboards
● Alerts for DBMS
● Security Manager
● Upgrades
NOM setup/configuration
● Adding an instance to NOM

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NOM in action - Home Page
- Sign into NOM (let’s not have the warning about common passwords!)
- Show the home page - system topology
- NOM, DBMSs and Instances
- Show single instance agent is offline in topo
- Show alert message that agent is down on single instance
- Show DBMS selector in header (and explain the matching names in the Home
Topology)
- Start the agent (only) on the single instance
- Show the changes in topology
- Show the changes in alerts
- Start the single instance DBMS
- Show the changes in topology
- Show the changes in alerts
- Choose a DBMS to work with and move to Status Panel

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NOM in action - Status Panel
- Show the system topology view
- Explain the focus is “next level down” from home page
- Create a new database - show it in the topology
- Stop a database - show it in the topology
- Drop the new database - show it in the topology
- Switch to tabular view
- Same output as cypher “show databases”
- Demo sort and search on this table
- [No need to show database view]
- Move to Dashboard

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NOM in action - Dashboards (Host)
- Explain title bar (period selector, tabs)
- Table for hardware resources
- Quick run through the host metrics
- Explain the “polling interval” and “must poll” logic
- 30secs by default with 5 min “must poll”
- Mention that housekeeping is coming in a future release
- With cluster selected, show the member selection with legend
([en|dis]able)
- Move to dashboard -> instance tab

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NOM in action - Dashboards (Instance)
- Show table of disk resources
- (Explain that directories share same mountpoint?)
- Quick run through the instance metrics
- Move to Dashboard -> Database tab

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NOM in action - Dashboards (Database)
- Show database selector
- (Explain that database dashboard is for a selected database)
- Quick run through the database metrics
- Move to DBMS alerts

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NOM in action - DBMS Alerts
- Explain that this is a subset of the home page alerts for the selected
instance
- Stop one of the cores on the cluster with the cluster selected
- (in time) show that the instance down alert appears
- Move to Security Manager
(Here I can display the Warning of the ghost instance and pass to the
operations chapter, and start on how to solve this alert by creating and starting
a new agent inside the VM of the ghost instance)

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Speed up Operations
Demo time ⚙️

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Demo for
1. Creating and setting an agent -> Then
display the alert disappearing and the VM
appearing in the topology
2. Security Manager
3. Upgrade
4. About?!

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NOM setup - register an agent
- Register an agent
- Show the instructions to install the agent properly
- Start the agent already installed in the server
- Display the alert removal in the Alerts Page
- Display the new DBMS instance in the topology

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NOM in action - Security Manager (Users)
- Show how to create a user
- Also show the cypher code
- Show how to edit a user
- Show how to reset a user’s password
- Show how to remove a user
- Mention that some user capabilities will be added soon (homeDB,
rename)
- Move to Security Manager -> Roles

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NOM in action - Security Manager (Roles)
- Show how to create a role
- Show how to edit a role
- Membership
- Rename workaround
- Show how to clone a role
- Show how to remove a role
- Move to Security Manager -> Privileges

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NOM in action - Security Manager (Privileges)
- Show how to grant a new privilege
- Show how to deny a privilege
- Show how to revoke a privilege
- Use filters to find privileges quickly
- Move to Upgrades

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NOM in action - Upgrades
- Show the available information in upgrades
- Explain the functionality which will be added for Neo4j 5 migration
- And other upgrades
- Clarify that fully automatic upgrades are not (yet) on the roadmap

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NOM setup - add an instance
- To demonstrate NOM setup, we will walk through adding a read replica to
the cluster
- Start the prepared RR instance and let it join the cluster and sync raft groups
- Show the alert that there is an unmanaged instance in the cluster
- If RR instance is on same host, add the instance to the agent
- If RR instance is on a new host, deploy and configure the agent
- Show that the instance is now shown and the alert is removed
- Show that the Home page topology, status panel and dashboard are all
updated

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Useful links
- https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/
- https://neo4j.com/docs/operations-
manual/current/monitoring/metrics/reference/
- https://neo4j.com/docs/operations-manual/current/docker/clustering/

34. © 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Neo4j, Inc. All rights reserved.
Next Steps

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Neo4j Operations Manager 1.0 and next priorities
Support for multiple Neo4j DBs
Support for self-managed on prem
and cloud deployments
Topology and statuses at a glance
Metrics dashboard
Up / Down alerting
Security management (RBAC)
Docker / Kubernetes deployments
Upgrade and Migrate
License management
Logs, Query, and Performance
Forward looking
v 1.0 GA
Configuration management
Update every 8 weeks:
fixes, functions, features

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Get it - timeline, prerequisites and eligibility
● Available end June 2022
● Manages Neo4j Enterprise Edition instances running 4.4.0 and later
○ No support for Community Edition
○ No support for versions earlier than 4.4.x
● Works currently with Windows and Linux tarball/zip installations
○ Package managers should be available at launch
○ Docker/Kubernetes should be available shortly after launch
● Available FOR FREE for customers with a valid Neo4j EE DBMS license

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Q&A Session
FAQ responses
● Does it work with Aura, Cloud?
○ Support for Aura (managing Aura instances and running NOM as a Service)
will be added later
○ NOM will be able to be run on AWS, GCP, Azure
● Does it work with Docker/K8s?
○ Not currently, but support is expected early Q3 2022.
● Does it work with CE?
○ No support for CE is currently planned
● Does it work with Desktop?
○ No support for desktop is currently planned
● How much does it cost?
○ It is free to use for a customer with a valid EE Neo4j DBMS license
● Can I try this out without an EE license?