Installation Guide

This document describes the installation process of the Camunda Optimize distribution, as well as various configuration possibilities available after initial installation.

Before proceeding with the installation, please read the article about supported environments.

Prerequisites

Before installing Optimize, make sure you have a JRE (Java Runtime Environment), or better, a JDK (Java Development Kit) installed if you plan to use the distribution. It is required to install Java version 8.

Download JDK 8

Demo Distribution with Elasticsearch

The Optimize Demo distribution comes with an Elasticsearch instance. The supplied Elasticsearch server is not customized or tuned by Camunda in any manner. It is intended to make the process of trying out Optimize as easy as possible. The only requirement in addition to the demo distribution itself is a running engine (ideally on localhost).

To install the demo distribution containing Elasticsearch, please download the archive with the latest version from the download page and extract it to the desired folder. After that, start Optimize by running the script optimize-demo.sh on Linux and Mac

./optimize-demo.sh

or optimize-demo.bat on Windows:

.\optimize-demo.bat

The script ensures that a local version of Elasticsearch is started and waits until it is up running. Then it starts Optimize, ensures it is running and opens automatically a tab in a browser to make it very convenient for you to try out Optimize.

Production Distribution without Elasticsearch

This distribution is intended to be used in production. To install it, first download the production archive, which contains all the required files to startup Camunda Optimize without Elasticsearch. After that configure the Elasticsearch connection to connect to your pre-installed Elasticsearch instance and configure the Camunda BPM Platform connection to connect Optimize to your running engine. You can then start your Optimize instance by running the script optimize-startup.sh on Linux and Mac:

./optimize-startup.sh

or optimize-startup.bat on Windows:

.\optimize-startup.bat

Production Docker image without Elasticsearch

The Optimize Docker images can be used in production. They are hosted on our dedicated Docker registry and are available to enterprise customers who bought Optimize only. You can browse the available images in our Docker registry after logging-in with your credentials.

Make sure to log-in correctly:

$ docker login registry.camunda.cloud
Username: your_username
Password: ******
Login Succeeded

After that configure the Elasticsearch connection to connect to your pre-installed Elasticsearch instance and configure the Camunda BPM Platform connection to connect Optimize to your running engine. For very simple use cases with only one Camunda Engine and one Elastichsearch node you can use environment variables instead of mounting configuration files into the Docker container:

• OPTIMIZE_CAMUNDABPM_REST_URL base URL that will be used for connections to the Camunda Engine REST API (default: http://localhost:8080/engine-rest)
• OPTIMIZE_CAMUNDABPM_WEBAPPS_URL endpoint where to find the camunda webapps for the given engine (default: http://localhost:8080/camunda)
• OPTIMIZE_ELASTICSEARCH_HOST the address/hostname under which the Elasticsearch node is available (default: localhost)
• OPTIMIZE_ELASTICSEARCH_HTTP_PORT port number used by Elasticsearch to accept HTTP connections (default: 9200)

For example to use a different Camunda Engine you can start Optimize as follows:

docker run -d --name optimize -p 8090:8090 -p 8091:8091 \
           -e OPTIMIZE_CAMUNDABPM_REST_URL=http://example.org/engine-rest \
           registry.camunda.cloud/optimize-ee/optimize:latest

If you want the file with the license key automatically recognized by the Optimize Docker container, you can use standard Docker means to make the file with the license key available inside the container. Replacing the ABSOLUTE_PATH_ON_HOST_TO_LICENSE_FILE with the absolute path to the license key file on your host you can use the following command:

docker run -d --name optimize -p 8090:8090 -p 8091:8091 \
           -v ABSOLUTE_PATH_ON_HOST_TO_LICENSE_FILE:/optimize/environment/OptimizeLicense.txt:ro \
           registry.camunda.cloud/optimize-ee/optimize:latest

This can be combined with the use environment variables to configure Optimize, of course.

Usage

You can start using Optimize right away by opening the following URL in your browser: http://localhost:8090

Then you can use the users from the Camunda Platform to login to Optimize. For details on how to configure the user access, please consult the user access management section.

Before you can fully utilize all features of Optimize, you need to wait until all data has been imported. A green circle in the footer indicates, when the import is finished.

Configuration

All distributions of Optimize come with a predefined set of configuration options that can be overwritten by the user, based on current environment requirements. To do that, have a look into the folder named environment. There are two files, one called environment-config.yaml with values that override the default Optimize properties and another called environment-logback.xml, which sets the logging configuration.

You can see all supported values and read about logging configuration here.

Optimize Container Configuration

The following YAML Paths correspond to settings available in the environment configuration.

• container.ports.http - A port number that is used by the embedded jetty server to process HTTP connections

Default value: `8090`

• container.host - You can configure a host either by host name or IP address, to identify a specific network interface on which to listen

Default value: `0.0.0.0`

Elasticsearch configuration

You can customize the Elasticsearch connection settings used by Optimize by changing the following properties:

• Define one or more Elasticsearch nodes Optimize can connect to:

  • es.connection.nodes.host - The address/hostname under which the Elasticsearch node is available.

  Default value: 'localhost'

• es.connection.nodes.httpPort - The port number used by the Elasticsearch node to accept HTTP connections.

  Default value: '9200'

• es.settings.index.prefix - Define a prefix to be prepended to all indexes and aliases created by Optimize, this allows to have multiple isolated Optimize instances running that use one Elasticsearch cluster. For more details see Shared Elasticsearch Cluster. Default value: 'optimize'

Camunda BPM configuration

To perform an import and provide the full set of features, Optimize requires connection to the REST API of the Camunda engine, which can be configured using the following properties.

• engines.\${engineAlias}.rest - A base URL that will be used for connections to the Camunda Engine REST API

Default value: `http://localhost:8080/engine-rest`

• engines.\${engineAlias}.name - The name of the engine that will be used to import data

Default value: `default`

Import of the data set

By default, Optimize comes without any data available. To start using all the features of the system, you have to perform a data import from the Camunda BPM Platform. This process is triggered automatically on start.

If you are interested in the details of the import, please refer to the dedicated import overview section.

Hardware Resources

According to the tests with different data sets described on import overview page we can recommend to carefully choose hardware resources that are allocated to the server with Optimize.

We recommend following minimum hardware for data sets:

Small Size Of Data (less than 1 million process instances)

• Camunda Optimize:
  • 2 CPU Threads
  • 512 MB RAM
• Elasticsearch:
  • 2 CPU Threads
  • 1 GB RAM

Medium Size Of Data (more than 1 million and up to 2 million process instances)

• Camunda Optimize:
  • 2 CPU Threads
  • 1 GB RAM
• Elasticsearch:
  • 2 CPU Threads
  • 2 GB RAM
  • local SSD storage recommended

Large Size Of Data (2 million process instances or more)

• Camunda Optimize:
  • 2 CPU Threads
  • 2 GB RAM
• Elasticsearch:
  • 4 CPU Threads
  • 6 GB RAM
  • local SSD storage

Please be aware, that Optimize is using data structures that are different from data stored by the Camunda BPM Engine. The final amount of space on the hard drive required by Optimize will depend on your replication settings, but as a rule of thumb you could expect Optimize to use 30% of the space that your relational database is using.

Recommended Additional Configurations

Adjust engine heap size

Sending huge process definition diagrams via Rest-API might cause the engine to crash, because of the limited heap size. Thus, it is recommended to increase the heap size of the engine to at least 2 gigabyte or preferably more, e.g., by adding the following java command line property when starting the engine:

-Xmx2048m

Also it is recommended to decrease the deployment cache size to 500, e.g. by:

<property name="cacheCapacity" value="500" />

Adjust Optimize heap size

By default Optimize is configured with 1GB JVM heap memory. Depending on your setup and actual data you might still encounter situations where you need more than this default for a seamless operation of Optimize. To increase the maximum heap size you can set the environment variable JAVA_SYSTEM_PROPERTIES and provide the desired JVM system properties, e.g. for 2GB of Heap:

JAVA_SYSTEM_PROPERTIES=-Xmx2048m