Hi LDMers,
All ya'll LDM admins have certainly seen these suspicious lines in your
ldmd.conf file:
# rtstats uses the LDM to send product latency statistics to the UPC.
# For more info on rtstats please see the man page.
EXEC "rtstats -h rtstats.unidata.ucar.edu"
Do you know what it does? It is not a means for Unidata to backdoor your
server, it launches a process that sends summary statistics back to
Unidata and are subsequently made available here:
http://rtstats.unidata.ucar.edu/rtstats/
The code that drives that service on Unidata's end dates back many moons
and as a testament to its quality, continues to work to this day! But
sadly, the website lacks many of the over hyped tech buzzwords of today,
like JSON, web services, python (hehe), etc.
So in a fit of rage/stupidity, I offered at the fall Unidata User's
Committee meeting to "revamp" the service and provide a demonstration
replacement for Unidata to consider using as their rtstats website
service. You can see more gory details here:
https://github.com/Unidata/unidata-usercomm/issues/2
So my demonstration can be found here:
https://rtstats.agron.iastate.edu
An initial goal was to maintain stable URIs from the Unidata service as to
not break folk's links nor bookmarks. Based on a platform of postgresql,
python, JSON, matplotlib, etc, the hope was to have something that the
community/Unidata/me can iterate on. For example, an immediate add-on
would be the inclusion of highcharts (for example) based interactive
plots. For an initial demonstration, I only wished to replicate current
functionality.
OK, so the purpose of this email is to make the community aware of this
work and ask for feedback / folks interested in helping out. The current
code repo for this work can be found here:
https://github.com/akrherz/rtstats/
And if you are further curious, a few current talking points.
1) The current demonstration is running on modest hardware and some of
the services/plots are much slower than they should be. The
implementation at Unidata will likely be on SSD drives, which will
make my programming/db skills look better than they actually are.
2) There was an interesting BUG in LDM that impacts rtstats ability to
properly display stats:
https://github.com/Unidata/unidata-usercomm/issues/2#issuecomment-251396736
If you are running LDM version 6.11.7 to 6.12.15.38, this BUG may
prevent your site's stats from appearing on my demo site.
3) Unidata graciously provided me a feed of the rtstats.unidata feed, so
my demonstration is using the same data as current production.
4) In theory, you could setup this rtstats code in your shop and point
your legions of LDM servers at it to display stats locally/discretely,
but my code tends to cause explosions, so perhaps it could just
provide some inspiration.
later,
daryl
--
/**
* daryl herzmann
* Systems Analyst III -- Iowa Environmental Mesonet
* https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu
*/
