I have C applications that will run on multiple machines at different sites.
Now I want to control and monitor these C applications. For that I am thinking about Java Web Application using Servlet/JSP.
I am thinking that C applications will connect to Java Web application over TCP. In my web application, I am thinking to implement manager which communicates with C applications over TCP. I will start manager when web application starts as separate thread. And manager will communicate to servlet requests via Context and Session. So whenever user do something on browser, I want to use functionalities of my manager at server, with ServetContext an Session as interface.
So this is what I am thinking. So, I want to know if there is better approach, or I am doing anything wrong? Can anyone please suggest me better solution?
EDIT
Current workflow: whenever I need to start / stop C application, I have to SSH remote machine puTTY terminal, type long commands, and start / stop it. Whenever there is some issue, I have to scroll long long log files. There couple of other things like live status of what application is doing/processing all things at every second, that I can't log always in log file.
So I find these workflow difficult. And things like live status I can't monitor.
Now I want to have web application interface to it. I can modify my C application and implement web application from scratch.
New Workflow to implement: I want to start / stop C application from web page. I want to view logs and live status reports / live graphs on web page (monitoring what C application is doing). I want to monitor machine status also on web page.
The web interface I thinking to design in Java using JSP/servlets.
So, I will modify my C application so it can communicate with with web application.
Question:
Just need guidelines / best practices for making new workflow.
EDIT 2
Sorry for confusion between controller or manager. Both are same thing.
My thoughts:
System will consist of C applications running at different sites, Java controller and Java web app running parallely in Tomcat server, and DB.
1) C applications will connect to controller over TCP. So, controller here becomes server and C applications client.
2) C applications will be multithreaded, will receive tasks from controller and spawns new thread to perform that task. When controller tells to stop task, C application will stop thread of that task. Additionally, C applications will send work progress (logs) every second to controller.
3) Controller receives task commands from web application (as both running parallelly in Tomcat server, both in same instance on JVM), and web application will receive commands from user over HTTP.
4) The work progress (logs) received every second from C applications to controller, controller will then insert logs in DB for later analysis (need to consider if it is good insert logs in MySQL RDBMS, may be needed to do lot of inserts, may be 100 or 1000 every second, forever). Web application may also request recent 5 minute logs from controller and send to user over HTTP. If user is monitoring logs, then web application will have to retrieve logs every second from controller and send to user over HTTP.
5) User monitoring C application tasks, will see progress in graph, updated every second. Additionally text lines of logs of info/error events that may happen occasionally in C applications.
6) C applications will be per machine, which will execute any task user sends from web browser. C applications will be running as service in machine, which will start on machine startup, will connect to server, and will stay connected to server forever. Can be running idle if no tasks to perform.
It is a valid approach, I believe sockets is how most distributed systems communicate, and more often than not even different services on the same box communicate that way. Also I believe what you are suggesting for the java web service is very typical and will work well (It will probably grow in complexity beyond what you are currently thinking, but the archetecture you describe is a good start).
If your C services are made to also run independantly of the management system then you might want to reverse it and have the management system connect to the services (Unless your firewall prevents it).
You will certainly want a small, well-defined protocol. If you are sending lots of fields you could even make everything you send JSON or xml since they will already have parsers to validate the format.
Be careful about security! On the C side ensure that you won't get any buffer overflows and if you parse the information yourself, be strict about throwing away (and logging!) data that doesn't look right. On Java the buffer overruns aren't as much of a problem but be sure that you log packets that don't fit your protocol exactly to detect both bugs and intrusions.
Another solution that you might consider--Your systems all share a database already you could send commands and responses through the DB (Assuming the command/responses are not happening too often). We don't do this exactly, but we share a variable table in which we place name/value pairs indicating different aspects of our systems performance and configuration (it's 2-way), this is probably not optimal but has been amazingly flexible since it allows us to reconfigure our system at runtime (the values are cached locally in each service and re-read/updated every 30 seconds).
I might be able to give you more info if I knew more specifics about what you expected to do--for instance, how often will your browser update it's fields, what kind of command signals or data requests will be sent and what kind of data do you expect back? Although you certainly don't have to post that stuff here, you must consider it--I suggest mocking up your browser page to start.
edits based on comments:
Sounds good, just a couple comments:
2) Any good database should be able to handle that volume of data for logging but you may want to use a good cache on top of your DB.
5) You will probably want a web framework to render the graph and manage updates. There are a lot and most can do what you are saying pretty easily, but trying to do it all yourself without a framework of some sort might be tough. I only say this because you didn't mention it.
6) Be sure you can handle dropped connections and reconnecting. When you are testing, pull the plug on your server (at least the network cable) and leave it out for 10 minutes, then make sure when you plug it back in you get the results you expect (Should the client automatically reconnect? Should it hold onto the logs or throw them away? How long will it hold onto logs?)
You may want to build in a way to "Reboot" your C services. Since they were started as a service, simply sending a command that tells them to terminate/exit will generally work since the system will restart them. You may also want a little monitoring loop that restarts them under certain criteria (like they haven't gotten a command from the server for n minutes). This can come in handy when you're in california at 10am trying to work with a C service in Austraillia at 2am.
Also, consider that an attacker can insert himself between your client and server. If you are using an SSL socket you should be okay, but if it's a raw socket you must be VERY careful.
Correction:
You may have problems putting that many records into a MySQL database. If it is not indexed and you minimize queries against it you may be okay. You can achieve this by keeping the last 5 minutes of all your logs in memory so you don't have to index your database and by grouping inserts or having a very well tuned cache.
A better approach might be to forgo the database and just use flat log files pre-filtered to what a single user might want to see, so if the user asks for the last 5 minutes "WARN" and "DEBUG" messages from a machine you could just read the logfile from that machine into memory, skipping all but warn/debug messages, and display those. This has it's own problems but should be more scalable than an indexed database. This would also allow you to zip up older data (that a user won't want to query against any more) for a 70-90% savings in disk space.
Here are my recommendations on your current design and since you haven't defined a specific scope for this project:
- Define a protocol to communicate between your C apps and your monitor app. Probably you don't need the same info from all the C apps in the same format or there are more important metrics for some C apps than others. I would recommend using plain JSON for this and to define a minimum schema to fulfill in order for both C to produce the data and Java for consume and validate it.
- Use a database to store the results of monitoring your C apps. The generic option would be using a RDBMS, probably open source like MySQL or PostgreSQL, or if you (or your company) can get the licenses go for SQL Server or Oracle or another one. This in case you need to maintain a history of the results, and you can clear the data periodically.
- Probably you want/need to have the latest results from monitoring available in a sort of cache (because in this time performance is critical), so you may use an in-memory database like Hazelcast or Redis, or just a simple cache like EhCache or Infinispan. Storing the data in an external element is better than storing it in plain
ServletContext because these technologies are aware of multi threading and support ACID, which is not the primary use case for ServletContext but seems necessary for the monitor.
- Separate the monitor that will receive the data from the C apps from the web app. In case the monitor fails or it takes too much time to perform some operations, the Web application will still be available to work without having the overhead to receive and manage the data from the C apps. In the other hand, if the web app starts to be slower (due to problems in the implementation of the app or something that should be discovered using a profiler) then you may restart it, and by doing this your monitor should continue gathering the data from the C apps and store them in your data source.
- For the threads in the monitor app, since it seems it will be based on Java, use
ExecutorService rather than creating and managing the threads manually.
For this part:
User monitoring C application tasks, will see progress in graph, updated every second. Additionally text lines of logs of info/error events that may happen occasionally in C applications
You may use Rx Java to not update your view (JSP, Facelet, plain HTML or whatever you will use) or another reactive programming model like Play Framework to read the data continuously from database (and cache if you use it) and update the view in a direct way for the users of the web app. If you don't want to use this programming model, then at least use push technology like comet or WebSockets. If this part is not that important, then use a simple refresh timer as explained here: How to reload page every 5 second?
For this part:
C applications will be per machine, which will execute any task user sends from web browser
You could reuse the protocol to communicate the C apps using JSON to the monitor and another thread in each C app to translate the action and execute it.
