Overview of Unified Stream Manager in Confluent Cloud

Unified Stream Manager (USM) is a feature in Confluent Cloud that provides a centralized interface to manage and monitor all of your Confluent environments. It lets you connect your self-managed Confluent Platform clusters to your cloud organization.

USM provides a complete view of your entire hybrid data streaming landscape from a single location. This lets you do the following:

  • Observe the health and performance of both cloud and on-premises clusters.
  • Govern topics, schemas, and data policies consistently across all environments.
  • Streamline migrations from on-premises Confluent Platform clusters to Confluent Cloud.

To learn more about USM components and architecture, see Unified Stream Manager in Confluent Platform.

How USM works

To use the hybrid capabilities of USM, you register your self-managed Confluent Platform clusters with Confluent Cloud. This process involves deploying a lightweight USM Agent in your on-premises environment.

To learn more about the agent’s architecture, see Unified Stream Manager in Confluent Platform.

  1. The agent securely collects operational metrics and metadata from your cluster.
  2. It transmits this information to Confluent Cloud over a secure, private network connection, such as AWS PrivateLink. After your Confluent Platform cluster is registered, its resources—such as topics and connectors—appear in the Confluent Cloud UI, which lets you manage them alongside your cloud resources.

Key capabilities

  • Manage hybrid clusters: Register on-premises Confluent Platform clusters and connectors so they appear alongside your Confluent Cloud clusters.
  • Unify observability: View the cluster health, operational metrics, topic throughput, and connector status for all clusters in one place.
  • Govern and discover data centrally: Use Cloud-native features like the Data Catalog and Stream Lineage to search, trace, and govern topics and schemas that span both Confluent Cloud and on-premises environments.
  • Enforce policies centrally: Enable global data contracts, schema validation, and metadata tagging from the cloud, with enforcement on connected on-premises resources.
  • Manage security and access control: Secure all connections by using private networking and manage operations with role-based access controls from Confluent Cloud.
  • Integrate with monitoring tools: Query metrics for all registered clusters by using the Confluent Cloud Metrics API to integrate with tools like Grafana and Datadog.

Getting started

To connect your hybrid environments, the first step is to register your self-managed Confluent Platform cluster. For instructions, see Register your Confluent Platform cluster.

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