How to Publish Connect Plugins to Self-Service

This guide shows you how to get a newly installed connector plugin to appear in Self-Service, either by waiting for the reconciliation job or by triggering it immediately, and what to check before upgrading a plugin App Owners already use.

Type

How-to guide

Goal

Make an installed connector plugin selectable by App Owners in Self-Service.

Audience

Tenant Admin, a user who can edit an Instance in Self-Service.

When to use

Use this guide after installing a plugin, when it is loaded in the cluster but not offered in Self-Service.

Axual Connect is deprecated. See Why Kafka Connect replaces Axual Connect for the deprecation timeline. On a new installation use Kafka Connect instead, where plugins are added per cluster rather than shared across every tenant. See How to Deploy a Kafka Connect Cluster.

A plugin loaded into the Connect cluster is not automatically known to Self-Service. Platform Manager learns about it through a scheduled reconciliation job, so there is a delay between installing a plugin and being able to select it.

Contents

The sections below cover each task in this guide:

Prerequisites

Confirm the following before you begin.

Access and permissions required

You need the following access and permissions:

  • A Tenant Admin account in Self-Service, for the manual trigger.

  • Read access to Platform Manager’s configuration, to check the schedule.

Resources that must exist before starting

The following must already exist:

Wait for the reconciliation job

The reconciliation.connect.plugin job publishes the cluster’s plugins to Self-Service on a schedule. Its frequency is Platform Manager’s SCHEDULER_RECONCILIATION_CONNECT_PLUGINS_CRON value, which is also where you change it. See Connect Reconciliation Jobs.

Wait for the scheduled run when the plugin is not needed urgently. The manual trigger below only skips that wait.

Trigger the reconciliation immediately

Saving an Instance runs the reconciliation job straight away, so an empty edit is enough to force it.

  1. Log in to Self-Service as a Tenant Admin.

  2. Go to the Instances page.

  3. Select the Instance associated with the Axual Connect cluster whose plugins you changed.

  4. Click Edit.

  5. Save the Instance without changing anything.

Confirm the result: start creating a Connect application, and check that the plugin now appears in the Plugin type list.

Before upgrading a plugin in use

Upgrading a plugin version can break the connectors already running on it, because a new version may require configuration the existing connectors do not set.

Collect the list of Connect applications using the plugin first, by searching on Application Class in Self-Service, then tell those application owners what the upgrade changes. Without that warning, the first report of a broken connector comes from the tenant.