Release Blog – Winter Release 26.1

At a Glance.

• Release date: 27 January, 2026
• Trading Partner Manager: Take control of partner onboarding with self-service workflows that reduce manual coordination
• Process Map: Visualise your entire data integration landscape and understand dependencies at a glance
• Pathfinder enhancements: Generate SQL and crontab syntax from natural language
• External Monitoring: Connect to enterprise tools like New Relic and Grafana with custom dashboards

The Challenge of Scaling Your Partner Network.

Your partner network is growing. That’s good news for your business. But every new trading partner means another round of emails, phone calls, collecting certificates, and coordinating connection tests. Your team spends hours on administrative work instead of actual integration. Meanwhile, you’re trying to understand how hundreds of profiles connect and interact, and your monitoring tools can’t give you the visibility your enterprise needs.

Winter Release 26.1 changes that. Available to all Lobster Data Platform customers starting January 27, 2026, this release puts control back in your hands with automated partner onboarding, complete integration visibility, and the freedom to monitor on your terms.

Trading Partner Manager – Your Partner Ecosystem, Your Control.

Picture this: It’s Monday morning, and you need to onboard three new suppliers. With traditional approaches, you’re looking at days of back-and-forth emails collecting company details, exchanging certificates, clarifying technical requirements, and coordinating firewall tests. Your team becomes a coordination hub instead of building integrations.

Trading Partner Manager transforms this reality.

As part of our new Supply Chain Collaboration capabilities, Trading Partner Manager is included in all Data Platform plans and gives you complete control over partner onboarding. Configure the onboarding workflow once: create a branded email with your logo and data security terms, define what information and certificates you need. Then, invite partners individually or in bulk.

What happens next is where the magic happens: Your partners receive your branded email, click the link, and enter a guided wizard where they provide their details and upload certificates. The system automatically tests the connection in the background. By the time your team gets involved, all the information is collected, verified, and ready.

Key capabilities:

• Bulk or individual invitations: Onboard multiple partners simultaneously or add them one at a time as needed
• Branded partner experience: Your logo, your terms, your identity throughout the entire onboarding journey
• Guided self-service: Partners see exactly what’s required with step-by-step instructions that eliminate confusion
• Automated certificate management: Partners upload certificates directly, and the system handles renewal notifications when certificates approach expiration
• One-click connection testing: Both you and your partners can verify certificates and network settings without coordinating firewall test sessions
• Seamless platform integration: All partner configurations flow directly into your Lobster Data Platform, ready for final setup

Why it matters: Trading Partner Manager reduces your onboarding time from days to hours. Your team focuses on mapping business logic and customization, not chasing emails. Scale your partner network without scaling your administrative overhead. Most importantly, you control the entire process from your platform.

Process Map – See Everything, Control Everything.

You’re managing 200+ integration profiles across multiple profile groups. A critical profile fails at 3 PM on Friday. You need to understand the impact: What does this profile trigger? What depends on it? Which external systems are affected? If something downstream fails, where do you even start?

Until now, answering these questions meant clicking through profile groups, mentally piecing together dependencies, and hoping you found everything. Process Map eliminates that guesswork.

With Process Map, you see your entire integration workflow as a visual graph. Generate it from a profile group, an individual profile, or directly from other elements like API endpoints, Portal components, or Event Handling configurations. Instantly understand how everything connects.

Key capabilities:

• Graph visualisation: View your integration processes as an interactive map showing relationships and data flow
• Dependency tracking: Understand which profiles are coupled and how data moves between them
• Caller visibility: See what triggers a profile to run, not just what the profile triggers downstream
• System visibility: Identify which channels, database configurations, and external systems are involved in your processes
• Downstream logic tracking: See which subsequent logic could be triggered by a specific profile
• Multiple entry points: Generate the map from profile groups, individual profiles, or specific elements like APIs or Portal components
• Immediate troubleshooting context: When something fails, see the full picture of affected systems and processes

Why it matters: Process Map gives you control through clarity. Understand your integration landscape at a glance. Troubleshoot faster by seeing the complete context immediately. Plan changes with confidence knowing exactly what will be affected. This is your first view of the big picture, with more visualisation capabilities coming in future releases.

Pathfinder Enhancements – Your AI Co-Pilot Gets Smarter.

Remember when we introduced Pathfinder in release 25.1? We promised it would evolve with every release, learning new skills and becoming a more capable partner in your integration work. Release 26.1 delivers on that promise.

Your AI co-pilot just got two powerful new abilities that save you time and eliminate error-prone manual work.

Text-to-SQL: Describe Your Data, Get Your Query

Need to pull specific data from your database? Stop looking up syntax references and mentally translating your requirements into SQL. Just describe what you want in plain English: “Show me all orders from last month over 1,000 EUR.” Pathfinder understands your actual database schema and context, generates the SQL query that works with your specific tables and columns, and lets you insert it directly into the SQL Editor with one click.

This isn’t generic AI generating generic queries. Pathfinder knows your data structure and creates queries that actually work the first time.

Crontab Syntax Generation: Schedule in Plain English

Creating crontab expressions means either memorising cryptic syntax or constantly referencing documentation. Describe your schedule the way you think about it: “Run every five minutes starting January 1st” or “Execute daily at 3 AM except Sundays.” Pathfinder creates the correct crontab expression instantly.

Going the other direction? Pathfinder also explains existing crontab statements in plain English and shows you the next few run times, helping you verify schedules without decoding syntax.

Why it matters: Every minute you spend looking up syntax or debugging expressions is a minute not spent delivering value. Pathfinder handles the mechanics so you can focus on the logic. Fewer manual edits mean fewer mistakes. And this is just the beginning – Pathfinder continues to learn new skills with every release.

External Monitoring – Monitor Your Way, With Your Tools.

Your enterprise has standardised on New Relic for monitoring. Or maybe it’s Grafana. Or Datadog. Your infrastructure teams have built dashboards, configured alerts, and trained everyone on these tools. But monitoring your Lobster Data Platform means logging into a separate interface, using different graphs, and maintaining parallel alerting systems.

Release 26.1 gives you the freedom to monitor on your terms.

For the first time, you can connect your Data Platform to the enterprise monitoring tools you already use. We’ve implemented OpenTelemetry and Prometheus protocols, giving you flexibility in how you capture and visualise platform performance. This works for both on-premise and Lobster Cloud customers, so you maintain full visibility into your cloud instance from your own monitoring infrastructure.

What makes this powerful: We expose not just standard JVM metrics, but business metrics that matter to your operations. Profile executions, job runs, message throughput, error rates, partner onboarding completion times – the data that helps you understand actual business performance, not just system health.

To get you started quickly, we provide downloadable JSON dashboard templates for New Relic and Grafana that you can import directly and customize for your needs.

Key capabilities:

• OpenTelemetry and Prometheus support: Connect using the protocols your monitoring tools already understand
• Enterprise tool compatibility: Works seamlessly with New Relic, Grafana, and Datadog
• JVM and business metrics: Monitor system health alongside real integration activity and business KPIs
• Ready-to-use dashboard templates: Download JSON templates for New Relic and Grafana as your starting point
• Custom alerting: Use your monitoring tools to create alerts based on Data Platform metrics – get notified when throughput trends deviate, job failures spike, or any other condition you define
• Works everywhere: Available for on-premise and Lobster Cloud customers with full visibility into cloud instances

Why it matters: Enterprises need to monitor all systems in one place. Now the Lobster Data Platform fits into your existing monitoring strategy. Build custom dashboards tailored to your business. Set alerts that match your operational thresholds. Most importantly, you control how you monitor, not the other way around. This is our first step in expanding monitoring capabilities – expect more metrics and logging features in future releases.

Further Improvements.

We’re committed to helping our customers solve any integration challenge. Beyond the major features in this release, we continuously improve core capabilities, productivity, and user experience. We know: even the smallest improvements can make your day-to-day work faster, smoother, and easier.

Documentation & Visibility.

• Centralized Documentation: All Lobster user documentation is now unified at docs.lobster-world.com. Find what you need faster with powerful search, access help directly from within the platform, and look forward to more tutorials and guides in future releases.
• Cloud & Service Status Page: Check the current status and planned maintenance for Lobster Cloud and related services anytime at https://www.lobster-world.com/en/system-status/. No need to contact support to verify if there’s a service issue.

Integration Capabilities.

• Google Pub/Sub Support: We’ve added Google Pub/Sub as an additional messaging service. Publish and subscribe to Google’s messaging bus directly from your standard integration profiles, just like you would with any other message queue. If you’re running workloads on Google Cloud or integrating with systems that use Pub/Sub, you can now connect seamlessly without workarounds.
• Enterprise Vault Integration (Password Support): For the first time, connect your Lobster Data Platform to enterprise vault solutions. We’re launching with support for Azure Key Vault and HashiCorp Vault for centralised password management. Store all integration passwords in your vault instead of the Data Platform, and changes sync automatically. Certificate support will follow in future releases, giving you complete secrets management control.
• Self Registration Template for Portals: Managing user access across multiple portals can create administrative bottlenecks and security risks. The Self Registration template lets customers and partners manage their own user registrations via customizable invitation links and bulk user uploads, while you retain centralized control through policies such as email domain restrictions. Users get faster portal access with intuitive self-service flows, and your business benefits from reduced administrative overhead, stronger access controls, and scalable onboarding for large partner organizations.

Deployment & Administration.

• Bridge Unattended Installation: Deploying Lobster Bridge clients across multiple systems just got easier. Define your configuration once, download it, and run unattended installations on different systems – either manually or fully scripted. This is perfect for large-scale deployments, automated provisioning, or environments where manual installation isn’t practical. Updates work the same way, keeping your Bridge clients current without hands-on intervention.
• SSO Configuration Through UI: Configuring Single Sign-On no longer requires editing XML files or contacting support. Set up and manage your SSO provider directly through the Lobster Data Platform interface, and changes apply immediately without requiring a system restart.
• Enterprise Security Enhancements: We continue to strengthen platform security to meet evolving enterprise requirements. This release includes additional security improvements to ensure the Lobster Data Platform aligns with the standards and expectations of security-conscious organisations. Transport Manager no longer requires local passwords in an SSO setup, reducing the need to manage and store local credentials.

API Management.

• Unified API Manager with Rate Limiting: We’ve merged MCP and REST API capabilities into one single menu item, making it easier to manage all your API endpoints in one place. This release also adds rate limiting, allowing you to control request limits per endpoint and ensure fair usage across your API consumers.

Deprecations.

HtmlToPdfPostExecutor v1 is now deprecated and will be removed in version 26.4-LTS (12 months from now). If you’re still using v1, please migrate to HtmlToPdfPostExecutor v2, which has been available since version 25.1-LTS, to ensure your setup continues to work with future releases.

Legacy portal at portal.lobster.de was shut down on December 31, 2025. It has been fully replaced by the Update Center, which has been available in our software for several years. With the latest updates on all supported versions, you can now use the Update Center to select and download the specific Lobster version you need.