Introducing Server Management

Updates Announcements
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Hi Creators!

Today, we’re excited to launch Server Management, a new page in Creator Hub with improved tooling for restarting servers. Restarting servers is primarily used for rolling out updates in your experiences to all players. With Server Management, you’ll have greater clarity and insight into the process. Let’s dive in!

Landing on the Server Management Page

Server Management displays real-time stats about servers and players in each of your Places for an experience. To reduce clutter, only Places which have servers running (excluding Team Create) are shown (these are the servers your players are in)

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Server Management page

For each Place you can view key information in realtime. The table will automatically update every 5 seconds with:

  • Number of servers/players across all servers and outdated servers
  • Latest published version
  • Time the version was published

An “outdated server” is any server which is not running the latest published Place Version. This is to help you understand the impact of launching Restart Servers

Initiating a Server Restart

To initiate a new server restart you can select the Places you wish to restart (or the toggle in the table header to select all Places) and then click the “Restart Servers” button

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Confirmation of Server Restart

This will bring up a confirmation dialogue with additional options and information:

  • Restart only servers with outdated versions - If selected, none of the servers that are running the latest published Place Version will be restarted. Unless you have an experience update workflow that is independent of Place Version, you should keep this checked to avoid unnecessarily disconnecting players

  • Delay server restart - Whenever Roblox launches a Restart, all servers that are going to be restarted are no longer used for matchmaking. This means that players joining your experience by clicking the Play Button will not go to any of these servers. You can now add a delay before these servers begin shutting down to allow players time to leave on their own instead of being temporarily disconnected

  • Impact of Server Restart - This displays the total number of Places, servers, and players that will be impacted by the selected options. It helps you understand how your experience will be impacted before you trigger the Restart. We are also hopeful it will help avoid common mistakes such as attempting to restart only outdated servers but forgetting to first publish the new Place Version

Tracking Server Restarts

After initiating a server restart, a new entry will appear in the Server Restart Status table. The information in the tracker is real-time and will automatically update every 5 seconds

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Server Management page after a Restart has been initiated

We call out the individual steps so that you have a better insight into what’s going on behind the scenes. We also show:

  • Places which were restarted
  • Versions that were used for the new servers
  • Time the restart was initiated
  • Configuration used for the restart
  • Real-time progress of the restart

A restart is considered complete when there are no more servers running an outdated version. Or, if you configured to shut down all servers, when there are no servers running that were created before the restart was initiated

This feature is now available for all experiences. We hope it will bring significant improvements to your ability to roll out updates to your players. Try it out and let us know what you think! We’d love to hear about your workflow and which enhancements you’d like to see next!

Resources

FAQ

What will happen to the existing UIs?

  • The various “Migrate,” “Shut Down,” and “Restart” buttons will be renamed to “Restart Servers” and redirect to the Server Management page. Rest assured, all functionalities of these buttons are still supported in the new UI. For example, to perform the equivalent of clicking “Shut Down All Servers” uncheck the options “Restart only servers with outdated versions” and “Delay server restart”
    We will wait 1-2 weeks before updating these buttons to ensure that any unforeseen issues in the new UI don’t block your ability to update experiences

How many concurrent in-progress server restarts can I have?

  • There is no limit to the number of in-progress restarts

What if I’m in the middle of a restart and need to publish a new version?

  • You can initiate another restart for the same Place while one is in progress. All servers will move to the latest published Place version
    For example, let’s say you’re restarting servers to move from version 100 to version 101. You notice a bug in version 101 and publish a fix for it in version 102. You can trigger another restart to move players to version 102. Any servers that hadn’t been restarted yet will go directly to version 102 and any servers which already moved to version 101 will restart again to move to version 102

I use a “Soft Shutdown” script. How does using Server Management to restart servers impact me?

  • There will be no impact to existing Soft Shutdown scripts. Some developers use “Soft Shutdown” scripts to control how players are migrated when a server restarts (such as picking a different PlaceId to teleport to). Using Server Management gives you more control over which servers are restarted and when, but does not change anything about how individual servers are shut down
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Super happy to see features like this being improved! I’d love to see a feature where we can target a specific place version to shut down / migrate, it’s been a pretty big pain point for our team! It seems like the delayed restarts may resolve this though?

I love how delaying a server restart disables matchmaking, this is HUGE for us. I’d love for there to be a way to know a delayed restart is being initiated, so we can communicate that to the end user. Our current workflow will be to initiate a shutdown notice via MessagingService for a place version, so it would be nice for some sort of binding API, if possible!

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Thank you for this, roblox. Did a great job again :+1:

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Amazing update! Now if only I could schedule an update ahead of time…

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Great change! Would love to see these new migration behaviors logged on the Activity History on the creator dashboard. Server Migrations should appear in Activity History

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Wow, what I did is a new feature I tested! Thank you @SuperPat77 for posting this. This: 5/5 stars :glowing_star:

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Will we be able to see the amount of servers running the current version? At moment I only see the amount of undated. It would be a cool extra stat to have I think.

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Like this update a lot, only not a fan of removing all the buttons from the quick access menu on the experience page. Seems as though that’s just adding another button to press that leads you to another page when the same functionality (and better ux) can be retained by just keeping the buttons.

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cook cook cook cook cook cook cook cook COOK!

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The features shown actually seem really amazing! I am excited

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This is one of the best updates yet, it would also be good if you could make a restart scheduler.

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Can we Display that Server Version number in our game and is there a way to get the latest version in game so we could possibly tell players that they are not in the latest server version?

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Great addition!
Could you add a possibility to specify “Restart servers older than version X”?
Very often I find myself in a situation where there is an important bug, which is fixed in a specific version (e.g. 150). So I need to restart only the servers having a version with a lower number (149 or below).
There may be other versions (e.g. 151, 152, 153) after the version which does the fix, containing minor updates or additions, but they are not so important so I do not need to restart the servers with versions 151, 152.

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hard agree with you here, love this update EXCEPT this extra step to shutdown servers. I would like to have the new data and options surfaced up

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This is an awesome addition, especially allowing players to rejoin at their own pace instead of being interrupted, that’s a great improvement!

Would it also be possible to expose an API/event to indicate the game being scheduled to shut down?

This would eg be useful to allow the existing match to continue, but block new rounds from starting, minimizing player frustration and friendly pushing them towards rejoining.

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often we didn’t restart immediately to interrupt current players so they don’t lose their current progress, but more player could still join in and the servers will take a long time to die out.

i feel great that the delay restart will block further players from joining outdated servers.

Is there any event or signal we can get from within a delay restarting server, so that we might be able to issue some notifications or system text chat to warn players that they might choose to wrap up and restart the game?

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Will this include an automatic warning, in each server being shut down, which would show how long until the shutdown? I’d imagine this would be most easily shown via the chat in 5 minute intervals, and then 1 minute after that point, however I realize that some experiences lack a visible chat.

But, more importantly, will there be API for developers to hook into an event for this delayed shutdown system? That way we can connect to that event and handle it in our own way that would fit our individual experience(s) best.

I was already writing this, but I see that part of this was already mentioned:

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I would also want a signal so a script can detect the server will shut down in a few minutes. I like this idea. :folded_hands: :happy1:

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Absolutely genius ! I’m glad to see this is finally a thing.

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