WHAT AM I TRYING TO ACHIEVE
Synopsis:
Trying to create an API or connector for an inhouse monitoring tool that integrates with SCOM [System Center/Microsoft System Operations Manager 2012].
Our tool has a restful page with all the necessary endpoints and simply would like SCOM to read the status of those endpoints.
Thus far according to SCOM documentation and my understanding, I need to build a management pack. And this consists of Authoring tools with visual studio etc.
Whilst I am still going through the documentation on this, whose tackled something like this before. Some guidance on how to approach this would be appreciated.
##### UPDATE [04/01/16] ########
Thinking.... * Plan to create a MP(s) for Discovery, Monitoring and Dashboard.*
New Question...
Created a script using posh that exposes the endpoints needed by SCOM.
+ These need to be converted to a class object (converting posh to xml). - not done yet!
+ Thinking ahead I am not sure what Base Class to use for this discovery script?
A very simple way to do this would be with Web Application Availability Monitoring, which works with any HTTP endpoint. As well as checking availability, this monitor can check the content of the response and raise an alert accordingly.
To get started, use the SCOM console and navigate to Authoring > Management Pack Templates > Create > Web Application Availability Monitoring
This blog is a really good walkthrough of doing that:
http://www.opsmanfan.com/index.php/6-use-scom-2012-to-monitor-a-webapi-without-using-scripts
Some limitations with this approach vs. a custom management pack:
you won't get any control over the alert content (name, desciption etc)
it won't scale well to many monitors (in terms of administrative burden)
you can't represent the health using a complex object model (no classes / discoveries)
If you want to test a large number of URLs with this method, then a community Management Pack called URLGenie might also help:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/tysonpaul/archive/2015/05/04/urlgenie-management-pack-for-scom-an-easy-solution-for-bulk-website-monitoring.aspx
You are right that custom MP is the right way to do an integration of the custom/third-party monitoring system with SCOM. You have to think about three important things when you are planning your work on such MP:
How you are going to get information from external system
How you are going to persist and use it in SCOM
How you are going to visualize it in SCOM
Let's walk through these three items:
From your intro it looks obvious - your system exposes RESTful API. SCOM (even 2012 or 2016) doesn't have native datasources to parse JSON so you'll need to create custom datasources using Powershell or C# (depends on your experience) . In this case, it might be reasonable to use any standard library to make this job easier.
SCOM has its special object model. You have classes to represent objects, monitors to detect failures/state changes and rules to collect performance metrics and alerts/events. So you'll need to implement Discovery datasources to get data about objects, monitored by your custom monitoring system (such as servers, databases, disks, apps, etc.) and define a class hierarchy to persist these objects in SCOM.
Then you'll need to create datasources for monitors and rules and here you must think before act - what failures, alerts and metrics you want to expose to SCOM. When you have clear understanding of this area - you are good to implement that (again - using PS or C#).
SCOM will give you some OOB visualization after you dome (1) and (2), so in the minimal scenario you'll need to define just a couple of views to show in SCOM console data collected by your MP. In ultimate case - if you want to have some fancy visualization - you'll have to create custom Dashboard. A good option here - use dashboards from SQL Server MP (it was released recently, it's free and it is really cool).
In fact, SCOM is not a monitoring system, but a framework, which has runtime platform, development language, and libraries, so building your own MP is closer to programming than IT administration :)
You also can try to use Silect MP authoring tool, but I'm not sure if it will help you to build custom datasources better than VS.
Good luck!
P.S. feel free to ping me via LinkedIn for more details about MP development.
Related
We are creating a online platform and exposing an Julia API via a embedded code-editor. The user can access the API and run some analysis on our web-app. I have a question related to controlling access to the API and objects.
The API right now contains a database handle and other objects that are exposed to the user and can be used to hack the internal system.
Below is the current architecture:
UserProgram.jl
function doanalysis()
data = getdata()
# some analysis on data
end
InternalProgram.jl
const client = MongoClient()
const collection = MongoCollection(client,"dbname","collectionName")
function getdata()
data = #some function to get data from collection
return data
end
#after parsing the user program
doanalysis()
To run the user analysis, we pass user program as a command-line argument (using ArgParse module) and run the internal program as follows
$ julia InternalProgram.jl --file Userprogram.jl
With this architecture, user potentially gets access to "client" and "collection" and can modify internal databases.
Is there a better way to solve this problem without exposing the objects?
I hope someone has an answer to this.
You will be exposing yourself to multiple types of vulnerabilities - as the general rule, executing user inputed code is a VERY BAD IDEA.
1/ like you said, you'll potentially allow users to execute random code against your database.
2/ your users will have access to all the power of Julia to do things on your server (download files they can later execute for example, access other servers and services on the server [MySQL, email, etc]). Depending on the level of access of the Julia process, think unauthorized access to your file system, installing key loggers, running spam servers, etc.
3/ will be able to use Julia packages and get you into a lot of trouble - like for example add/use the Requests.jl package and execute DoS attacks on other servers.
If you really want to go this way, I recommend that:
A/ set proper (minimal) permissions for the MongoDB user configured to be used in the app (ex: http://blog.mlab.com/2016/07/mongodb-tips-tricks-collection-level-access-control/)
B/ execute each user's code into a separate sandbox / container that only exposes the minimum necessary software
C/ have your containers running on a managed platform where tooling exists (firewalls) to monitor incoming and outgoing traffic (for example to block spam or DoS attacks)
In order to achieve B/ and C/ my recommendation is to use JuliaBox. I haven't used it myself, but seems to be exactly what you need: https://github.com/JuliaCloud/JuliaBox
Once you get that running, you can also use https://github.com/JuliaWeb/JuliaWebAPI.jl
I have a big Domino Web application, which uses numerous calls "OpenAgent" to Java agents to retrieve data via ajax. The application is used by several users.
What are the main parameters that you advise me to check and adjust on server, in order to avoid HTTP hang or performance issues?
There is quite an overhead in calling to an agent be it LotusScript or Java. So if your AJAX calls are quite frequent you are going to overload the server easily.
Domino comes with a test tool for this called Server.Load. It will allow you to emulate a heavy load server and you will see how your code performs under that. Another I've used is Rational Functional Tester (trial version), but there are probably free ones out there as well (eg. JMeter/LoadRunner. I haven't used).
So if you are doing infrequent complex actions that may take time and don't need a quick response to the user, I would recommend to continue with the web agent.
If it is simple look up calls I would recommend to use alternative methods. For example XPages has the AJAX functionality built into it with scaling in mind. Or if it is JSON data then look into Domino Data Service, or Domino URL commands.
I'm an untrained, newbie code hacker playing with a homebrew MediaPlayer for streaming live internet audio. An old fashioned "radio" if you will. I'm using OnInfo, OnError and OnBuffferingUpdate info to fill a "status" textView box on my player, but I see so much more detailed info in logcat from the AwesomePlayer engine. Is it possible to access the AwesomePlayer info directly from the application?
From an application perspective (assuming the application is written in JAVA), MediaPlayer is the abstraction for all player engines. There are multiple player engines such as StagefrightPlayer which internally uses AwesomePlayer and NuPlayer to name a couple.
The information made available on listeners i.e. onInfoListener, onBufferingUpdateListener, onErrorListener originates from AwesomePlayer which is translated into a generic message and is communicated through the listeners. This information is deemed to be sufficient for any application developer to develop their code around the same.
AwesomePlayer logs are more from debug perspective and helps to understand the underlying implementation of the engine. I feel that this information is good to know and understand, but not sure if this is essential for application development.
To summarize, AwesomePlayer information is actually communicated through the listeners which are generic in nature and rest of the logcat information is more for debug or understanding purposes. Currently, there is no scheme to get this information unless the developer explicitly customizes the AOSP distribution.
I want to access a Cassandra instance in an Iphone application and i need an objectiveC client
for that. I couldnt find one, Thrift is supposed to support ObjectiveC but I couldnt figure out how to do that. If anyone has any knowledge on the subject it is very much appriciated.
Apache Thrift has a generator for ObjC. (Complete list).
If you will distribute the application I would considered the alternative to create a server with simple interface (eg. http) that in turns access the cassandra database.
But if you are the only user it could work with direct database access.
If you're not sure about how to get Thrift to generate the bindings then go with what Schildmeijer posted. Use a simple web server running php + phpcassa or any language of your choice that comes with a high level client library -- list here: High level clients.
You can use some open source libraries to expose resources from Cassandra as JSON or XML then use NSURLRequests to do the work. If you go with XML then Google's GDataXML is an excellent choice of parser, if you go with JSON then json-library on Google Code is another great choice.
Have fun!
I have set up a Content Type Hub and tested the syndication is working correctly by creating a test content type and watching it be published to the client site.
Then I deployed the content types I am actually interested in publishing to the hub (by way of a feature) along with the site columns they depend on.
I get the error
Content type '...' cannot be published to this site because feature '...' is not enabled.
I want to deploy content types with features for upgradability and ease of porting between dev, qual and prod environments. But am left not understanding what the benefit of the Hub is.
If I have to activate the deploying feature, the content types will already be on the site before publishing will take place. If I have to manually create the content types on the Hub site with the web UI (yuck!), I have the issue of trying to keep three landscapes manually synchronized.
Is there a way to efficiently manage content type deployment to the Hub while still using the Hub to publish the content types?
The advantage of using the Content Type Hub, is that it allows you to use and reuse your Content Types over multiple site collections and Web Applications throughout your farm.
Because all of your site collections are now using instances of the same syndicated content types, if, in the future, you need to add/remove/rename columns within the content types, this is done as easily as updating the content type, and resubscribing (then allowing sharepoint to run its timer jobs, and double checking that the changes updated because you're a careful SharePoint administrator).
I am not sure which error you are receiving, there simply isn't enough context in your post. However, I think you may be slightly confused on how syndicated content types are published. First, you turn on the content syndication hub publishing feature on the site collection that holds all of the content types you are going to reuse throughout your farm. Next you configure the mixed metadata service, so that SharePoint loads each of your content types "into memory" more or less.
After this step, you get to choose which site collections you want to subscribe to the syndication hub. To do this, you need to turn on the content type publishing site collection feature. Note: If you use blank templates for your sites you may receive a feature error like you've described, due to a "flaw" with blank templates. See my post at: http://www.thesharepointblog.net/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=109
Only AFTER you've turned on the subscribing feature, And content Type Hub timer job has run, AND the subscribing timer job has run, will your site collection see the available content types.
As for manually creating content types on the hub site, the only OOB way of doing this is to use the UI. Personally, I wrote a utility that does everything I just described for me, from creating the initial content types, to creating the syndication hub, publishing them to all of the site collections, and most time consumingly, associating them with all of the lists and libraries on the subscribing site collections. I had intended for my employing company to sell it, but as they don't seem interested, I could open source it if there is enough interest.
Hope this was helpful.
This looks like a shortcoming of the hub, indeed.
I've witnessed it before.
If you've deployed your content type to the hub, please check if the INHERITS tag of the content type element is set to TRUE. Otherwise it won't work in a hub.
<ContentType ID="xxxxx"
Name="xxxx"
Group="xxxx"
Description="xxxx"
Inherits="TRUE"
Version="0">
</ContentType>
Don't forget that you can actually synchronize the content types BETWEEN farms -- this is especially valuable when you are developing on a separate farm and don't want to hassle with a PnP Framework for managing your content types... In some cases, the Content Type may already exist on the production farm and you need a copy of them on dev and/or test..