MLflow 2.8.1 is a patch release, containing some critical bug fixes and an update to our continued work on reworking our docs.

Notable details:

• The API mlflow.llm.log_predictions is being marked as deprecated, as its functionality has been incorporated into mlflow.log_table. This API will be removed in the 2.9.0 release. (#10414, @dbczumar)

Bug fixes:

• [Artifacts] Fix a regression in 2.8.0 where downloading a single file from a registered model would fail (#10362, @BenWilson2)
• [Evaluate] Fix the Azure OpenAI integration for mlflow.evaluate when using LLM judge metrics (#10291, @prithvikannan)
• [Evaluate] Change Examples to optional for the make_genai_metric API (#10353, @prithvikannan)
• [Evaluate] Remove the fastapi dependency when using mlflow.evaluate for LLM results (#10354, @prithvikannan)
• [Evaluate] Fix syntax issues and improve the formatting for generated prompt templates (#10402, @annzhang-db)
• [Gateway] Fix the Gateway configuration validator pre-check for OpenAI to perform instance type validation (#10379, @BenWilson2)
• [Tracking] Fix an intermittent issue with hanging threads when using asynchronous logging (#10374, @chenmoneygithub)
• [Tracking] Add a timeout for the mlflow.login() API to catch invalid hostname configuration input errors (#10239, @chenmoneygithub)
• [Tracking] Add a flush operation at the conclusion of logging system metrics (#10320, @chenmoneygithub)
• [Models] Correct the prompt template generation logic within the Prompt Engineering UI so that the prompts can be used in the Python API (#10341, @daniellok-db)
• [Models] Fix an issue in the SHAP model explainability functionality within mlflow.shap.log_explanation so that duplicate or conflicting dependencies are not registered when logging (#10305, @BenWilson2)

Documentation updates:

• [Docs] Add MLflow Tracking Quickstart (#10285, @BenWilson2)
• [Docs] Add tracking server configuration guide (#10241, @chenmoneygithub)
• [Docs] Refactor and improve the model deployment quickstart guide (#10322, @prithvikannan)
• [Docs] Add documentation for system metrics logging (#10261, @chenmoneygithub)

Small bug fixes and documentation updates:

10367, #10359, #10358, #10340, #10310, #10276, #10277, #10247, #10260, #10220, #10263, #10259, #10219, @harupy; #10313, #10303, #10213, #10272, #10282, #10283, #10231, #10256, #10242, #10237, #10238, #10233, #10229, #10211, #10231, #10256, #10242, #10238, #10237, #10229, #10233, #10211, @BenWilson2; #10375, @serena-ruan; #10330, @Haxatron; #10342, #10249, #10249, @B-Step62; #10355, #10301, #10286, #10257, #10236, #10270, #10236, @prithvikannan; #10321, #10258, @jerrylian-db; #10245, @jessechancy; #10278, @daniellok-db; #10244, @gabrielfu; #10226, @milinddethe15; #10390, @bbqiu; #10232, @sunishsheth2009