Operations & Management
How to work with Frends as your Integration Platform.
Welcome to the Frends Operations and Management learning path! This series of articles is tailored for IT Support, Project & Service Managers, and Integration Owners who are responsible for overseeing a Frends Tenant. It is also highly beneficial for developers and architects who want a comprehensive understanding of the operational aspects of the Platform.
This path will guide you through the essential features for monitoring, managing, and maintaining your integrations, ensuring smooth and reliable operations.
Prerequisites
In the basics category we will go over the very basics of managing the Frends Tenant, and most of this content is available without administrator role in Frends, as they are something that can be and is expected to be done by almost everyone using the Frends Tenant.
Many of the advanced management features are for managing your Frends Tenant on a larger scale, and it is recommended to have the administrator role available to you to have full access to the features discussed in the second section of this learning path.
The basics explained in this path are also part of the Fundamentals path, which includes a cross-section of all the topics related to Frends but on the basic level only. If you have already passed the exam and are aiming for the Operations & Management Certificate, you can head straight over to the Advanced chapter of this path unless you need a refresher on the basic topics.
Getting Started
Frends' low-code integration editor makes it easy for anyone to understand the logic behind the integrations, while being powerful enough to make it possible to create anything in the capable hands of integration developers.
Having version control and CI/CD capable deployment and environments built in to the platform makes it easy to develop and deploy new features to test and production. Once deployed, the provided logging features show instantly what happened and where.
Are you perhaps interested in creating APIs using Frends? We have full suite of API management features too, built in and always included, just like the other features. Pop in your OpenAPI specification and link a process to each endpoint, and you're ready to get the integration logic flowing through an API. Securely, of course.
Frends Basics
Regardless of your role, you might want to get familiar with Frends Glossary as well as Frends Highlights which will help you understand the platform and terminology used better.
For the very basics of the platform, we recommend also checking out the Welcome tour in your Frends Tenant. You can find it from the Home View of your Frends Platform, under Onboarding, if it didn't launch automatically. You can also check this interactive demo we have built just for you:
Operations & Management Basics
In order to get started with Operations & Management basics on Frends, we recommed reading these guides and articles first. These are the same we have available on Getting Started with Managing Integrations and Getting Started with Supporting Integrations pages at the beginning of our Docs.
Additional Actions for Managing Frends
To build upon viewing the basics of details in Frends, it's recommended to check out the most common management operations within Frends Tenant.
You should also familiarize yourself with the other documentation for common management features in Frends.
Finally, you have the option to take the Tutorial 2b: How to operate & monitor Frends under Onboarding section in your Frends Tenant. This will give you a hand-on experience on navigating the features in Frends. Tutorial 4: Managing my Frends Processes & Environments will also support in learning these topics.
Advanced Management
On top of the basic operations available to be done by most Frends users, there are some advanced features limited to only administrators in Frends. While not always everyday tasks, they often come up in what needs to be done to keep Frends running smoothly and upgrading the capabilities of your Frends subscription.
Expanding & Updating your Frends
These topics cover the essentials in how to expand the capabilities of your Frends Tenant by scaling vertically, horizontally and by keeping your Frends up to date.
To support these guides, you can also read our Hybrid Integration Architecture documentation.
Authenticating Frends Users
In order to secure your Frends Tenant, we highly recommend enabling your own SSO for logging in to Frends.
To secure APIs, using the Entra ID authentication may be a good idea as well.
Frends Platform API
The Frends Platform API allows Frends to be managed via an API interface. This can be used to automate actions, such as editing Environment Variables or deploying Processes, or accessing Process Instances for monitoring them.
Platform management over API
Frends Platform API is a RESTful API that allows you to perform tasks and actions, and receive data from your Frends Tenant. The API thus allows automating management and monitoring tasks that otherwise would have to be done single piece at a time manually.
Accessing the API description and reference is done through your Frends Control Panel, using URL such as yourtenant.frendsapp.com/swagger. You can also find the latest Platform API reference from here.
Because it is an API and it's accessible within Frends as well, what better way to create your automation to your Frends Tenant than using Frends Processes to implement them. This way you can create Processes that will perform actions to other Frends Processes, as well as collect monitoring data and adjust values in your environment as needed.
The API is designed to be used in a RESTful manner specifying Frends elements to be accessed by their identifiers. Some responses provide links, which help with further requests for the elements contained in the response. Lists use paging or continuation tokens if the data is rapidly changing, e.g. Process Instances. In these cases you need to use the continuation token to have a consistent experience enumerating the list.
Enabling Platform API
In order to enable Platform API, some configuration is needed in your Azure Portal as well as with the Frends Support.
To learn the details, check out the guide to enabling Frends Platform API.
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