Pivotal Greenplum® Command Center 6.0.0 Release Notes

Updated 9/30/2019

About This Release

This document contains release information about Pivotal Greenplum Command Center 6.0. Greenplum Command Center 6.0 provides management and monitoring functionality for Pivotal Greenplum Database 6.

See Enhancements and Changes in Greenplum Command Center 6.0.0 for information about new features and changes in this Command Center release.

Supported Platforms

Greenplum Command Center 6.0.0 is compatible with the following platforms.

  • Pivotal Greenplum Database 6.0
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x1 and 7.x
  • CentOS 6.x1 and 7.x
  • Ubuntu 18.04

Enhancements and Changes in Greenplum Command Center 6.0

  • The Enable GPCC history data collection option on the Admin> Settings page is now on by default. If you turned off this option in your current Command Center installation and you upgrade to Command Center 6.0.0, the option will remain off. Pivotal recommends that you turn it on.

  • Command Center can collect all metrics without the Greenplum Database gpperfmon service. For lower overhead, stop the gpperfmon service if it is running. Set the gp_enable_gpperfmon server configuration parameter to off and restart Greenplum Database.

Command Center Installation Changes

  • Installing Pivotal Greenplum Database 6 includes the Command Center metrics collector extension and workload manager extension. The gp_enable_query_metrics server configuration parameter is set to on and the metrics collector shared library is added to the shared_preload_libraries configuration parameter.

  • It is no longer required to run gpperfmon_install to create the gpperfmon database before installing Command Center. The Command Center installer creates the gpperfmon database, the gpmon role, and the gpmetrics schema, if they do not already exist, and adds entries for the gpmon role to the pg_hba.conf file.
    Note that the Command Center installer does not create the old gpperfmon tables or set the gp_enable_gpperfmon configuration parameter to on, so the gpmmon and gpsmon data collection agents will not be started when you start Greenplum Database. If you want to use the old gpperfmon tables and agents, use the gpperfmon_install utility to create the gpperfmon database before you install Command Center. See Transitioning to the gpmetrics History Schema for more information about transitioning to the new gpmetrics history data.

  • If you include the -W option with the gpccinstall command, the installer prompts you to enter the password for the gpmon role. If the gpmon role does not already exist, the installer creates it with the password you specify. Without the -W option, the installer creates the gpmon role with the default password “changeme”.

  • The installer has a new -u (upgrade) option that installs Command Center using the configuration parameters from the current Command Center installation. You can use this option to reinstall the same version of Command Center or to upgrade to a newer version.

  • Japanese and Russian language options have been added to the Command Center installer.

  • The Command Center gpmon superuser creates external web tables, and this requires the Greenplum Database gp_external_enable_exec configuration parameter to be set to on. The parameter is on by default, but if it has been set to off, the Command Center installer will print a message and quit.

Transitioning to the gpmetrics History Schema

There can be two sets of history tables, both maintained in the gpperfmon database:

  • tables created by the Greenplum Database gpperfmon installation utility belonging to the public schema
  • tables created by Command Center belonging to the gpmetrics schema

Command Center 6 only requires the gpmetrics schema and it displays query and system metrics history from the gpmetrics schema by default. Before Command Center 6, both sets of history tables were required and Command Center displayed history from the tables in the public schema by default.

You can maintain both sets of tables if you choose, but for best performance, use only the gpmetrics schema.

To use both sets of tables, you must run the Greenplum Database gpperfmon_install utility to create the gpperfmon database before you install Command Center. To use only the gpmetrics history, let the Command Center installer create the gpperfmon database. You can disable the gpperfmon agents by setting the gp_enable_gpperfmon parameter to off and restarting Greenplum Database.

Other Improvements

  • New filter options are added to the History view to select query history by:

    • completion status
    • resource queue/priority or resource group
    • CPU skew greater than 0
    • Spill files greater than 0

  • Historical query search performance has been greatly improved.

  • Partitions for history tables in the gpmetrics schema are now created with RLE compression and the COMPRESSLEVEL=2 option, for improved compression/performance.

  • The Command Center web server now supports only the TLSv1.2 protocol and above for secured connections.

  • When canceling one or more queries in the Command Center UI, a pop-up box prompts you to enter a message of up to 128 characters to add to the error message that is displayed to the user.

  • On the System> Storage Status view, when you expand a Hostname, the Data Directory column now lists the mount points of partitions on the segment host file system that contain Greenplum segment data directories. When you move your cursor over a mount point, a tooltip lists the data directories the partition contains.

  • Logging improvements. A new log_level parameter in the $GPCC_HOME/conf/app.conf configuration file determines the level of messages that will be logged. The parameter specifies which messages are added to these log files: gpccinstall.log, webserver.log, agent.log, and cli.log.

    The parameter can be set to Debug, Info, or Error, where Debug is the most verbose and Error is the least verbose. The parameter values are not case-sensitive. The default is Info.

Fixed Issues

The following issues are fixed in this release.

  • [#166346339] If CPUSET is enabled for a resource group, the CPU% value is changed to -1. This value prevented editing resource groups in Command Center. Command Center now allows a -1 value in the CPU% field.

  • [#167156751] Query text files in the $MASTER_DATA_DIRECTORY/gpmetrics/query_text directory were not cleaned up automatically. This issue is fixed.

Known Issues

The following are known issues in the current Greenplum Command Center release.

Failure to Auto-Create Monthly Partitions in gpmetrics Schema

In time zones with daylight savings time (DST) ending in the month of October, Greenplum Command Center fails to create new October partitions for tables in the gpmetrics schema because it specifies the same start and end date for the partitions. The error does not occur in time zones that do not have DST, or in time zones with DST ending in November.

Workaround

Manually create partitions for October 2019.

Log in to the Greenplum master server as the gpadmin user and connect to the gpperfmon database as the gpmon user:

psql -U gpmon gpperfmon

Enter the following commands to create the October 2019 partitions:

ALTER TABLE gpmetrics.gpcc_disk_history
      ADD PARTITION START (date '2019-10-01') INCLUSIVE END (date '2019-11-01') EXCLUSIVE
      WITH (APPENDONLY=true, ORIENTATION=column, COMPRESSTYPE=RLE_TYPE, COMPRESSLEVEL=2);

ALTER TABLE gpmetrics.gpcc_system_history
      ADD PARTITION START (date '2019-10-01') INCLUSIVE END (date '2019-11-01') EXCLUSIVE
      WITH (APPENDONLY=true, ORIENTATION=column, COMPRESSTYPE=RLE_TYPE, COMPRESSLEVEL=2);

ALTER TABLE gpmetrics.gpcc_queries_history
      ADD PARTITION START (date '2019-10-01') INCLUSIVE END (date '2019-11-01') EXCLUSIVE
      WITH (APPENDONLY=true, ORIENTATION=column, COMPRESSTYPE=RLE_TYPE, COMPRESSLEVEL=2);

ALTER TABLE gpmetrics.gpcc_plannode_history
      ADD PARTITION START (date '2019-10-01') INCLUSIVE END (date '2019-11-01') EXCLUSIVE
      WITH (APPENDONLY=true, ORIENTATION=column, COMPRESSTYPE=RLE_TYPE, COMPRESSLEVEL=2);

ALTER TABLE gpmetrics.gpcc_database_history
      ADD PARTITION START (date '2019-10-01') INCLUSIVE END (date '2019-11-01') EXCLUSIVE
      WITH (APPENDONLY=true, ORIENTATION=column, COMPRESSTYPE=RLE_TYPE, COMPRESSLEVEL=2);

ALTER TABLE gpmetrics.gpcc_alert_log
      ADD PARTITION START (date '2019-10-01') INCLUSIVE END (date '2019-11-01') EXCLUSIVE
      WITH (APPENDONLY=true, ORIENTATION=column, COMPRESSTYPE=RLE_TYPE, COMPRESSLEVEL=2);

ALTER TABLE gpmetrics.gpcc_pg_log_history
      SPLIT DEFAULT PARTITION START (date '2019-10-01') INCLUSIVE END (date '2019-11-01') EXCLUSIVE
      INTO(PARTITION t2019Oct, DEFAULT PARTITION);

Cyrillic Font Support in the Pivotal UI

The Source Sans Pro font in the Pivotal UI toolkit does not contain Cyrillic symbols, so the Command Center UI falls back to the default sans-serif font. This may cause some cosmetic rendering problems for Russian users.

Unable to View Real Time Queries After Upgrading From a Previous Command Center Release

If you install a new version of Greenplum Command Center using the same port number as the previous version, and you use the Chrome web browser, you may be unable to view real-time queries until after you clear the browser’s cache. See the note in Connecting to the Command Center Console for steps to clear the browser cache.

Resource Queue Name Incorrect for Some Queries

To display the resource queue name for queries in the Query Monitor, Command Center caches user IDs with resource queue names. The cache is updated when the Command Center backend receives a planned query from the metrics collector. Some utility commands are not planned, such as COPY commands that have no SELECT clause. These commands use a resource queue slot, but are not passed through an optimizer. If a user is assigned a different resource queue and then executes an unplanned command, the Command Center Query Monitor will display the resource queue name that was previously cached.

Cannot Set SSH Path When Upgrading Command Center

The Command Center installer -ssh_path <path> command-line option specifies the path to a custom SSH command and also saves the path to the ssh_path parameter of the app.conf configuration file. If both the -u (upgrade) and -ssh_path options are specified on the gpccinstall command line, however, the -ssh_path option is ignored. The installer does not use the custom SSH command and the path is not saved in the app.conf file.