Chef Manage has now replaced the original management console in Hosted Enterprise Chef! It represents a complete reworking of the online Chef experience, bring more usability, power, and functionality to manage your infrastructure from the browser than ever before.
Improvements and New Features
Aside from a completely new, modern user interface, there are many functional improvements over the existing management console.
Bulk updates on thousands of objects is now simple. Select the objects you are interested in changing, and click one of the bulk actions on the sidebar.
Objects that are supported by search now have a convenient search bar at the top of their lists, making it easy to filter objects similar to how you would in Knife or other Chef tools you might be used to.
You can combine these new features in interesting ways! Try searching for specific types of Nodes, selecting them all, and adding a new tag. Voilà! All your Nodes, filtered on your search, are tagged in one fell swoop.
Numerous small improvements to the user experience include frustration free Run List editing, a sane JSON editor for attributes, intuitive permissions updating for objects and containers, Data Bag creation and management, slick wizards that make complex object creation easy… The list is goes on and on.
Chef Reporting
Included in Manage is the new Reporting Dashboard, which allows you to quickly see critical information, events, and trends happening in your infrastructure. This new overview of your organization’s Chef usage can be accessed by clicking on the Reports tab.
Also included is a preview of the Run History feature, which allows you to query a backlog of Chef-Client runs. Run History makes it easy to get feedback when something goes wrong or get additional information about a specific run or set of runs without leaving the browser. Drilling down into a specific run will yield information about the resources created or updated, the stacktrace and exception in the case of a failure, and even the diff in the case of file resources. Run History is temporarily limited to a single day of data but more will be available in the future, so stay tuned.
Improved Multi-Organization Support and Notifications
Managing multiple Chef organizations has never been easier! Switch between organizations at any page in the application by clicking the organizations dropdown in the top right. Your workflow shouldn’t have to be interrupted because the Data Bag you want to edit is in a different organization! Now it is simple and fast to manage multiple organizations on the fly.
Also in the top right, there is an improved notifications system. There are two separate views. In the first, you can see the queue for any bulk operations you sent to be processed in the background (only supported by some bulk operations currently, but more are coming). The notification center to its right is where you can see pending organization invitations and handle errors that might have occurred during a bulk operation you asked to be performed in the background.
Special Thanks
We are very appreciative of all the feedback and testing we received from users who gave the preview a try. Your input was invaluable in creating a fresh, working product for everyone! To people who missed out on the preview, you can still send feedback at any time by clicking the feedback button in the top bar.
We hope Chef Manage provides a delightful and powerful Chef management experience! Start now at https://manage.opscode.com/.
