Download TIMaCS User

Tools for Intelligent System Management of
Very Large Computing Systems
For information on how to start working with the Rule-Engine and its GUI client, please have a
look at the tutorial ./ruleEngineTutorial.pdf in the eclipse online help or at this location:
trunk/src/ruleseditor/timacs.rules.help/help/twiki/bin/view/Venus/TimacsRulesTutorial.pdf
The Rule-Engine is mainly responsible for the processing of raw data in form of messages.
Its tasks in more detail:
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Conversion of sensor specific data into a homogeneous and consistent format to describe
status information (service available/not available) and/or data.
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Combination of data from several messages belonging to one single logical resource (e. g.
the values "used", "reserved" and "free" for blocks and inodes in disk-free (df) of collectd).
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Comparison between actual values and configured reference values.
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Surveillance of threshold values.
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Possibility to trigger (simple) actions, like restarting daemons.
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Upstream reporting of actions.
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Escalation of actions, in case the locally triggered action did not solve the problem.
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Reduction of data to be sent upstream by filtering and aggregation.
Rule-Engines are registered and bound to AMQP-exchanges. During startup, the Rule-Engine will
create a topic exchange (name: "amq.direct") and will bind itself to this exchange with a default
routing key "rule_engine". Messages have dictionary-like structure, which can be hierarchical,
which means that every dictionary value can be a dictionary itself. For the Rule-Engine to work it is
required that every message has a key "kind" with a value that identifies the further structure of the
message dictionary. Any messages sent to this exchange must have the content_type
"application/sexpr" or "application/json" and be encoded accordingly in order to be correctly processed by the Rule-Engine ("application/sexpr" is a proprietary encoding based on s-expressions,
developed by s+c). By default, the Rule-Engine sends a timer message (kind= "timacs.monitoring.timer") to itself every 30 seconds. These timer messages are especially useful to monitor the availability of the monitoring infrastructure itself.
If errors occur during the processing of messages (e. g. malformed messages or rules), a special
message with kind "timacs.rules.engine.error" is sent to the Rule-Engine's AMQP exchange with the
exchange key "error".
It is the job of the Rule-Engine to process incoming messages according to a configured set of rules.
These rules are part of the Rule-Engine's configuration. They are created and deployed using a
graphical editor.
Questions and Answers concerning the Rule-Engine
•
The configurationReader has the possibility to fill out some brackets. The tutorial says “just
write 'Tutorial' inside the brackets. What should I write inside the brackets, when configuring a system for production?
Management
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