Hi Russ,
On 06/26/2013 07:57 AM, R P Herrold wrote:
>
> one thing I notice, coming to it is that you have not defined acronyms
> at first use -- reading 'How to implement "no news is good news"
> monitoring reliably' the term CMA is used
>
> I guess 'central monitoring agent' but ... I would expect a more
> distributed or federated approach to monitoring, so that there was
> trellis fail-across in the monitors
Returning this to the list - since this is something I should figure out
how to correct in the blog post - and future ones without being terribly
repetitive... If you wonder, others will wonder too...
The official acronym for this is Collective Management Authority.
The CMA is a system (potentially a cluster) which, although it runs
nanoprobes, is separate in most senses from the rest of the collective.
It is the "brains" of the outfit - it has the only knowledge of policy
and has the only access to the graph database.
This is primarily for security reasons, sanity reasons in debugging, and
not having policy splattered over thousands of machines.
It does not _do_ monitoring, it directs the collective on how to do
monitoring, and sits back to wait for the collective to report something
has failed (or changed).
In any reasonable-sized collection of computers, you won't need much CPU
to do this (a dual core with 16G of RAM is likely plenty). In the short
term, clustering will only be active/passive for high availability -
although I do have work items to allow it to grow into an active/active
cluster for performance as well as availability.
With regard to security, the CMA and the Neo4j database need to be as
well protected as we can make them. From the perspective of an
attacking black hat, the data we own about an enterprise is a map to
where the buried treasure is, and provides most of the clues you'd need
to dig it up...
Clearly we want to restrict access to the CMA - hence not mingling it
with the mere drones ;-).
Does that help?
--
Alan Robertson <[email protected]> - @OSSAlanR
"Openness is the foundation and preservative of friendship... Let me claim
from you at all times your undisguised opinions." - William Wilberforce
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