Introduction

KNIME Business Hub is a customer-managed Hub instance. Once you have a license for it and proceed with installation you will have access to Hub resources and will be able to customize specific features, as well as give access to these resources to your employees, organize them into Teams and give them the ability to manage specific resources.

This guide provides information on how to administrate a KNIME Business Hub instance.

To install a KNIME Business Hub please refer to the KNIME Business Hub Installation Guide.

A user guide is also available here, which contains instructions on how to perform team administration tasks. Team admins are designated by the global Hub admin, and have control over their team’s allocated resources, can add users to their team, create execution contexts and have an overview of the team’s deployments. In this way the Hub administration tasks are distributed and reallocated to those users that have a better overview of their own team necessities.

Create and manage teams

A team is a group of users on KNIME Hub that work together on shared projects. Specific Hub resources can be owned by a team (e.g. spaces and the contained workflows, files, or components) so that the team members will have access to these resources.

Sign in to the KNIME Business Hub instance with the admin user name by visiting the KNIME Business Hub URL.

Then click your profile picture on the right upper corner of the page and select Administration to go to the KNIME Business Hub Administration page. Click Teams in the menu on the left. Here you will be able to see an overview of the existing teams and you will be able to manage them.

Create a team

To create a new team click the yellow plus button on the right.

img create new team
Figure 1. Create a new team in the KNIME Business Hub Administration page

After you create a new team you will be redirected to the new team’s page. Here you can change the name of the team. To do so click the name of the team under the team logo on the left side of the page. The name of the team can also be changed at any point in time by the team administrator.

From the team’s page you can:

  • Add members to the team

  • Change their role to, for example, promote a user to team admininistrator role

Here you might for example want to assign the team to a team administrator. To do so click Manage team and enter the user name of the user you want to assign as a team administrator for the current team. Then click on the role and select Member and Admin. At the same time you might want to delete the global admin user name from the team members list. To do so click the bin icon corresponding to that user. Click Save changes to finalize the setting.

Allocate resources to a team

To allocate resources to a team navigate to the KNIME Business Hub Administrator page and select Teams from the menu on the left.

Here you can see an overview of the teams available, their allocated resourced, and of their current usage. Click the three dots on the right upper corner of the card corresponding to the team you want to allocate resources to.

img menu manage resources
Figure 2. Manage resources of a team

Select Manage resources from the menu. A panel on the right will open where you can select the resources you want to allocate.

img allocate resources
Figure 3. Allocate resources to a team

Here you can change:

  • The maximum number of members allowed in that team

  • The maximum number of execution vCore tokens allowed for that team

Click Save changes when you have set up the resources for the current team.

Manage team members

From the KNIME Business Hub Administration page you can also manage the team members.

Click the three dots on the right upper corner of the card corresponding to the team. From the menu that opens select Manage members. In the side panel that opens you can add members to a team, or change the team members role.

Delete a team

From the KNIME Business Hub Administration page you can also delete a team.

Click the three dots on the right upper corner of the card corresponding to the team. From the menu that opens select Delete. Be aware that this operation will delete also all the team resources, data and deployments.

Users management

To see a list of all the users that have access to your KNIME Business Hub instance you can go to the KNIME Business Hub Administration page and select Users from the menu on the left.

img list users admin
Figure 4. Manage users on KNIME Business Hub Administration page

Here you can filter the users based on their team, the type of users and their username and name. To do so click the funnel icon in the users list. You can also search the users by using the magnifier icon and typing the keyword in the field that appears.

Delete a user

You can delete a user from the KNIME Business Hub Administration page. Click the three dots and select Delete. You will need to confirm the user deletion in the window that opens by clicking Delete user. Be aware that this action will also delete all data from the deleted user and it will not be possible to restore the user.

Make a user Global Hub Admin

Users are managed in the backend via the Keycloak instance embedded in KNIME Business Hub. Therefore, the operation of promoting a registered user to the role of Global Hub Admin is done in Keycloak.

To do so follow these steps:

  1. First you will need to access the keycloak admin console. To do so you will need the credentials that are stored in a kubernetes secret called credential-knime-keycloak in the knime namespace. To get the required credentials, you need to access the instance the Business Hub is running on and run the following command:

    kubectl -n knime get secret credential-knime-keycloak -o yaml

    This will return a file that contains the ADMIN_PASSWORD and the ADMIN_USERNAME. Please notice that they are both base64 encrypted. In order to get the decrypted username and password, you can run the following commands:

    echo <ADMIN_PASSWORD> | base64 -d
echo <ADMIN_USERNAME> | base64 -d

  2. Then go to http://auth.<base-url>/auth/ and login.

  3. Navigate to the Users menu. Either search for the user by name, or click view all users to get the full list of registered users:

    img kc usersmenu
    Figure 5. The Keycloak users menu

    In order for a user to appear in this list, it is necessary that they have logged into your KNIME Business Hub installation at least once.

  4. In the user’s entry click Edit, then go to the Groups tab. Under available groups, select admin and click Join:

    img kc done
    Figure 6. Making a user a Global Hub Admin in Keycloak

  5. Done. The user now has the role of Global Hub Admin, and can access the admin pages from within the Hub application to e.g., create teams or delete users.

Please notice that right now there are some operations that can be performed only by the global admin user that was created contextually to the KNIME Business Hub instance installation. Therefore, it is recommended to not delete the corresponding global admin user even when more users have been promoted to global admin users.

Docker executor images

In order to create execution contexts for their teams, team admins will need to reference the Docker image of the KNIME Executor that they want to use.

Public Docker executor images are made available by KNIME which correspond to the full builds of KNIME Executor versions 4.7.x.

The currently available executor images have the following docker image name:

registry.hub.knime.com/knime/knime-full:r-4.7.0

registry.hub.knime.com/knime/knime-full:r-4.7.1-119

However you might want to add specific extensions to the KNIME Executor image that is made available to team admins to create execution contexts.

The following section explains how to do so.

Add extensions to an existing Docker image

In order to install additional extensions and features to the KNIME Executor image, you will need to first create a Dockerfile. The file is named Dockerfile with no file extension. You can use the example Dockerfile below which demonstrates how to extend the base image with a custom set of update sites and features.

# Define the base image
FROM registry.hub.knime.com/knime/knime-full:r-4.7.1-119

# Define the list of update sites and features
# Optional, the default is the KNIME Analytics Platform update site (first entry in the list below)
ENV KNIME_UPDATE_SITES=https://update.knime.com/analytics-platform/4.7,https://update.knime.com/community-contributions/trusted/4.7
# Install a feature from the Community Trusted update site
ENV KNIME_FEATURES="org.knime.features.geospatial.feature.group"

# Execute extension installation script
RUN ./install-extensions.sh

The KNIME_UPDATE_SITES environment variable determines the update sites that will be used for installing KNIME Features. It accepts a comma-delimited list of URLs. The KNIME_FEATURES environment variable determines the extensions which will be installed in the KNIME Executor. It accepts a comma-delimited list of feature group identifiers. A corresponding update site must be defined in the KNIME_UPDATE_SITES list for feature groups to be successfully installed. You can get the necessary identifiers by looking at Help → About KNIME → Installation Details → Installed Software in a KNIME instance that has the desired features installed. Take the identifiers from the "Id" column and make sure you do not omit the .feature.group at the end (see also screenshot on the next page). The base image contains a shell script install-extensions.sh which lets you easily install additional extensions in another Dockerfile.

Once the Dockerfile has been customized appropriately, you can build a Docker image from it by using the following command:

# Replace <image_name> and <tag_name> with actual values
docker build -t <image_name>:<tag_name> .

Support Bundles and Troubleshooting

When generating a support bundle, no data leaves the cluster.

If necessary, you can download the support bundle and send it to KNIME for the purpose of troubleshooting. Under extreme circumstances, the KNIME team may forward the support bundle to the Replicated support team for additional help.

When generating a support bundle, a limited amount of information will be automatically redacted (IPv4 addresses, connection strings, etc.). You can configure additional redactions and/or manually redact information prior to sending the bundle. See the Configuring redaction in support bundles section for more details.

KNIME Business Hub is capable of generating support bundles in a standard format, even when the admin console isn’t working. This ensures that users are able to provide all of the necessary information for KNIME to be able to identify the problem and prescribe a solution.

Generating a support bundle (GUI)

In order to help troubleshoot an installation, or to simply inspect the logs of the cluster in a user-friendly format, you will need to generate a support bundle.

Simply open the KNIME Business Hub Admin Console, navigate to the Troubleshoot pane, and click the Generate a support bundle button to generate a support bundle.

img ts 1
Figure 7. Generate a support bundle

All generated support bundles will display in the list above. Click the Download bundle button to download the bundle(s) you want to share with KNIME, and please see the Configuring redaction in support bundles section for information on how to redact confidential/personal information before sending.

Generating a support bundle (CLI)

See Replicated documentation for instructions on how to generate a support bundle via the Replicated CLI.

Configuring redaction in support bundles

When generating a support bundle, a limited amount of information will be automatically redacted (IPv4 addresses, connection strings, etc.) but it is not guaranteed to be a comprehensive set of redactions. You may have additional information in your logs or configuration that you do not wish to share with the KNIME engineering team.

One option is to unzip the generated .zip support bundle and manually review/redact information prior to sending the bundle to KNIME. However, there is a lot of information to review and the redaction of certain information can be automated fairly easily. The ideal option is to configure automated redactions via Redactor resources, which will automatically redact information for all future support bundles.

In order to configure automated redactors, first open the KNIME Business Hub Admin Console. Navigate to the Troubleshoot pane and click Configure Redaction.

img ts 2
Figure 8. Configure Redaction

If you have configured your own custom redactions that you feel would be valuable to other users of KNIME Business Hub, please feel encouraged to share the configuration with KNIME so that it can be considered & potentially added to future releases.

See this link and this link for more information.

Inspecting support bundles

There are quite a number of of files generated in a support bundle. Not necessarily every file is useful for every problem. However, by collecting the same information in the same way each time, KNIME can ensure the best quality support possible for customers.

It is possible to inspect a support bundle entirely in the admin console. See below for an example screenshot.

img ts 3
Figure 9. Inspect a support bundle in the admin console

Here are the most important folders/files and their purposes:

Path Purpose Example (may have properties omitted)

./analysis.json

  • Collects the highest-level insights possible for the installation.

  • Often times, the issue and/or resolution may be identified in this file by inspecting the [].name.insight.detail property.

 
[
  {
    "name": "kotsadm.status",
    "insight": {
      "name": "kotsadm.status",
      "primary": "kotsadm Status",
      "detail": "At least 1 replica of the Admin Console API is running and ready",
      "severity": "debug"
    },
    "severity": "debug",
    "analyzerSpec": ""
  }
]

./logs

  • Contains logs of individual pods.

  • Execution Context logs are stored in ./logs/execution-contexts.

(typical application logs)

./cluster-resources

  • Contains the configuration of each visible resource in the cluster.

  • For example, to see all pods in the cluster, navigate to the ./cluster-resources/pods directory which contains one file per namespace in the cluster.

 
{
  "kind": "PodList",
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "metadata": {
    "resourceVersion": "1686941"
  },
  "items": [ ... ]
}

Changelog (KNIME Business Hub 1.1.0)

KNIME Business Hub 1.1.0

(released February 8, 2023)

Enhancements

  • HUB-2662 Enable profile image editor for avatar

  • HUB-3306 Disable RWE viewing/editing for Hub according to user permissions

  • HUB-3854 Sort teams alphabetically in profile dropdown list

  • HUB-3939 Improve creation of teams for global hub admin

  • HUB-3980 Space access endpoint should be available only to team admins and user space owners

  • HUB-4075 Advanced scheduling options: stacked side drawer with toggles

  • HUB-4076 Consumers should not have read access to public content on hub.company.com if public browsing feature is switched off

  • HUB-4094 Show groups expanded by default

  • HUB-4104 Enable execution resources menu entry for team members

  • HUB-4120 Add "Basic edition" to license generator

  • HUB-4130 Enable global admins to change team execution resources

  • HUB-4161 Add limit for number of execution contexts

  • HUB-4200 Add Output Parameters to Workflow and Deployment OpenAPI

  • HUB-4205 Add endpoint to retrieve available Hub features

  • HUB-4250 Make team’s vCore limit accessible to team members as well

  • HUB-4319 Update to Quarkus 2.14.3

Bugfixes

  • HUB-3240 Breadcrumb not working when opening extension page from direct link

  • HUB-3922 Workflow not found on first render when opening from AP Explorer

  • HUB-3924 Executor watchdog marks jobs running on a freshly started executor as VANISHED

  • HUB-4067 EXAMPLES mount point doesn’t work when execution services are deployed in Community Hub

  • HUB-4093 Private spaces shown on teams page to non-team members if previously logged in as admin

  • HUB-4107 DnD icon overlaps on node page

  • HUB-4114 Spaces entry is disabled for teams leading to error when navigating to teams without spaces

  • HUB-4159 File Upload Widget does not work