Connexion

Enterprise Ready

Connexion is a great fit for organizations which need simple, easy-to-manage integrations. For more complex deployments, Connexion features a plethora of optional enterprise-level features, allowing it to integrate well into enterprise environments (both on-premise and cloud). Connexion includes:

• Powerful alerting: Utilize built-in support for email, SNMP, and SMS. Add your own custom logic (including integration with your existing alerting/eventing service), and utilize powerful filtering to include or exclude specific alerts. Leverage our metrics integration and products like Prometheus and Grafana to generate alerts based on historical performance.
• Role-based authentication and authorization: Connexion can leverage Active-Directory or Windows users and groups for authorization, and includes a granular set of permissions for all functionality.
• User management: View connected users and state, with the ability to message other connected users. Connexion uses user-based locks to implement concurrency control.
• Monitoring API: Utilize our monitoring API to determine the state of Connexion, and push that information to other systems within your enterprise.
• Auditing API: Utilize our auditing API to integrate fine-grained audit logs into your enterprise auditing solution. Connexion also includes built-in log-based auditing.
• Global variables: Create global variables (including passwords, database connections, map tables, schemas) which can apply to several different scopes (global, group-based, and tab-based). Provide a single place to change a variable which applies to multiple channels.
• Channel isolation: Organize channels into dedicated processes. This allows channels to be siloed as well as support legacy 32-bit processes.
• Change history: View who changed what and when, via graphical representation or configuration diffs.
• Channel Backups: In addition to built-in database backup functionality, perform nightly backups to other targets like S3.
• Metrics: Native Prometheus support lets you store time-series data about the performance and state of Connexion, including built-in and custom devices. Create complex dashboards, alerts, and reports.
• High Availability: Connexion supports Active/Passive clusters for high-availability and near-zero down-time upgrades.
• Import/Export: Support for import and export of most configuration, including bulk imports and exports of channels.
• Easy Navigation: Connect to multiple Connexion servers from a single UI, with easy navigation between servers.
• Message Tracing: Leverage our graphical message tracing feature to view how messages traverse Connexion (including message changes at each step). Tracing includes paths taken through other Connexion and Gateway environments.

Bring Your Own Logic

Connexion gives you the flexibility to customize and extend its functionality with your own logic. Whether you need to implement custom business rules, integrate with proprietary systems, or develop specialized workflows, Connexion’s extensible architecture makes it possible.

With Connexion’s developer-friendly framework, you can create custom devices, transformations, and integrations that seamlessly work with built-in components. The platform supports:

• Custom Device Development: Create your own device types that integrate smoothly with the Connexion platform.
• Plugin Architecture: Develop plugins that can be distributed via NuGet packages for easy deployment and updates.
• IDE Support: Develop in Visual Studio or Rider with full .NET language support and debugging capabilities.
• Feature/Future Proof: The ability to plug in your own message types and custom logic means it’s easy to extend Connexion as the industry evolves.
• Scripting: Write custom C# scripts directly in the UI to manipulate data or implement business logic.
• API Access: Leverage comprehensive APIs for deep integration with the Connexion engine.
• .NET Ecosystem: Access the entire .NET ecosystem of libraries and tools to extend functionality.

Connexion supports multiple concurrent versions of devices, enabling you to support multiple versions of your product(s) on a single Connexion instance. The Connexion UI offers fine-grained upgrades/downgrades of arbitrary channels.

Performance

Connexion performance is based on the underlying host, database host, and network latency. Throughput varies greatly based on the complexity of the workflow and the size of the messages traversing the system. Although Connexion is tuned for high channel counts over single-channel performance, a single channel processing HL7v2 ADT messages can operate at over 2000 messages per second on commodity hardware. When multiple channels are operating, throughput can exceed 5000 messages per second on commodity hardware. In large enterprises, it isn’t unusual for a single Connexion instance to host over 5000 channels.

Connexion has many options for tuning performance. For example, utilizing batch mode processing can be much faster than message-by-message processing for certain workflows. There is also fine-grained configuration available to store only necessary information.