Introduction

There’s a lot to know about infoset-ng which we’ll summarize here.

Features

infoset-ng has the following features:

  1. Open source.
  2. Written in python, a modern language.
  3. Easy configuration.
  4. Uses the well known Flask webserver for accepting data and responding to requests.
  5. infoset-ng has a number of fault tolerant features aimed at making it resilient in unstable computing environemnts.
  6. MariaDB / MySQL database backend
  7. Database connection pooling to reduce database load.
  8. Ingestion of data supports parallel multiprocessing for maximum speed.
  9. The infoset-ng-ng API server can tolerate the loss of communication with its database by caching the data locally until the database returns online.
  10. The infoset-ng configuration is entirely stored in files. This allows it to collect data in the absense of a database, such as during maintenance or an outage.
  11. Backups are simple. Just save the entire contents of the infoset-ng directory tree including hidden files, and save a copy of the database for your performance data.

We are always looking for more contributors!

Inspiration / History

The infoset-ng project originally took inspiration from the SourceForge based switchmap project. switchmap was written in PERL and designed to create tabular representations of network topologies. Early versions of infoset eventually had expanded features which included the polling of network devices for real time performance data. This data was presented via a web interface. The code became cumbersome and the original infoset was split into three componet parts.

  1. infoset-ng: An API for storing and retrieving real time data.
  2. garnet: A network / server performance charting web application that uses various types of agents for collecting real time data. garnet uses infoset-ng to store its data.
  3. switchmap-ng A python 3 based feature equivalent version of switchmap.

Each of these projects resides on the University of the West Indies Computing Society’s GitHub account.

Oversight

infoset-ng is a student collaboration between:

  1. The University of the West Indies Computing Society. (Kingston, Jamaica)
  2. The University of Techology, IEEE Student Branch. (Kingston, Jamaica)
  3. The Palisadoes Foundation http://www.palisadoes.org

And many others.