[op5-users] Ninja backend and architecture

[Johannes Dagemark]

Andreas Ericsson wrote:
> Matthias Flacke wrote:
>   
>> Hi,
>>
>> just want to congratulate you for this effort to give the stucked
>> 'Ride of the dark horse' some new impulse... ;)
>>
>> Some questions:
>> - in your announcement you spoke about 'Support for several
>> databases'. Does that mean, that you use something different for
>> backend than NDO?
>>
>>     
>
> Yes, we're using the Merlin module, which was originally designed
> as an event transport module/daemon pair, much like NDOUtils. We
> found that the NDO database scheme made it scale very poorly, so
> we had to design our own. The idea is to make Nagios scale to
> tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) hosts, which becomes
> rather simple since the Merlin module allows events to be sent not
> only from the Nagios daemon on the same host, but also over the
> network. The protocol is open, so other applications can use it
> to transfer data to a merlin daemon as well.
>
> Since the merlin daemon uses libdbi to talk to the database, we
> can currently speak to mysql and postgresql databases. Work (on
> libdbi) to get it working with oracle, Sybase, MSSQL and MSQL
> are under way, and once that's completed, we'll have support for
> those databases too, more or less for free. It's up to the user
> to install the proper libdbi driver packages though.
>
>   
>> - Can you give some more information about the architecture below
>> that GUI part? How does it interact with the wellknown Nagios
>> interfaces?
>>
>>     
>
> This'll be hard without some means of drawing stuff, but here's
> what happens when an event is triggered inside Nagios:
> * Nagios calls the eventbroker module part of Merlin.
> * merlinmod creates a merlin packet from the event and
>   - transfers it to the merlin module if the connection is live
>  or
>   - writes it to a backlog file for later feeding to the unix
>     domain socket connecting the module to the daemon
> * The daemon inspects the incoming packet and inserts it into
>   the database (if appropriate) and, optionally, transfers the
>   event to other merlin daemons, which handle it in pretty much
>   the same way.
>
>   
Hi Mattias

Attached is a very rough sketch I made to illustrate the architecture, 
"very rough".

Cheers
Johannes Dagemark
>> - Is it perhaps planned to add some kind of an API to structure the
>> interaction between GUI and backend?
>>
>>     
>
> Yes. We have to do that since a new status map will also be included
> in the GUI, and the people writing the status map are contracted and
> shouldn't have to worry about database layout and things like that.
> We're aware of possible changes that may need to be done to the db
> layout later, and we want a stable API that everyone can use to pull
> stuff out of the database. Per Åsberg knows more about that, as I've
> only been working on the datafeeding part. I expect to work quite a
> bit on the API once the Merlin stuff is about 90% complete though.
>
>   


-- 
Johannes Dagemark
CTO / VP Engineering
________________________________________

op5 AB
Första Långgatan 19
SE-413 27 Gothenburg
cell: +46 733-70 90 24
fax:  +46 31-774 04 32
Email: jd at op5.com
http://www.op5.com/

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