Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Simon Elliston Ball]

Yep, I'm wondering whether our parser interface should have the ability to
create schema either like that, or well, that, which would be helpful
within Metron as well.

@Otto, the one thing missing from the record reader api, is that if you
don't emit any records at all for a flow file, it errors, which is not
strictly speaking an error, but yeah, we can certainly control things like
filtering errors aside from this. I would say this was a nifi bug
(debatably) which should be fixed on that side.

Simon

On 13 August 2018 at 14:29, Otto Fowler  wrote:

> Also,  If we are doing the record readers, we can have a reader for a
> parser type and explicitly set the schema, as seen here :
> https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-nar-bundles/nifi-standard-
> services/nifi-record-serialization-services-bundle/
> nifi-record-serialization-services/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/syslog/
> Syslog5424Reader.java
>
>
>
> On August 13, 2018 at 09:26:50, Otto Fowler (ottobackwa...@gmail.com)
> wrote:
>
> If we can do the record readers ourselves ( with the parsers inside them )
> we can handle the returns.
> I’ll be doing the net flow 5 readers once the net flow 5 processor PR (
> not mine ) is in.
>
> I don’t think having a generic class loading parsers foo and having to
> manage all that is preferable to having
> an archetype and explicit parsers.
>
> Nifi processors and readers are self documenting, and this approach will
> make that not possible, as another consideration.
>
>
>
> On August 13, 2018 at 06:50:09, Simon Elliston Ball (
> si...@simonellistonball.com) wrote:
>
> Maybe the edge use case will clarify the config issue a little. The reason
> I would want to be able to push Metron parsers into NiFi would be so I can
> pre-parse and filter on the edge to save bandwidth from remote locations. I
> would expect to be able to parse at the edge and use NiFi to prioritise or
> filter on the Metron ready data, then push through to a 'NoOp' parser in
> Metron. For this to happen, we would absolutely not want to connect to
> Zookeeper, so I'm +1 on Otto's suggestion that the config be embeddable in
> NiFi properties. We cannot assume ZK connectivity from NiFi.
>
> I can also see a scenario where NiFi might make it easier to chain parsers,
> which is where it overlaps more with Metron. This is more about the fact
> that NiFi make it a lot easier to configure and manage complex multi-step
> flows than Metron, and is way more user intuitive from a design and
> monitoring perspective. My main concern around using NiFi in this way is
> about the load on the content repository. We are looking at a lot of
> content level transformation here. You could argue that the same load is
> taken off Kafka in the chaining scenario, but there is still a chance for a
> user to accidentally create a lot of disk access if they go over the top
> with NiFi.
>
> I see this as potentially a a chance to make the Metron Parser interface
> compatible with NiFi Record Readers. Then both communities could benefit
> from sharing each other's parsers.
>
> In terms of the NAR approach, I would say we have a base bundle of the NiFi
> bits (https://github.com/simonellistonball/metron/tree/nifi already has
> this for stellar, enrichments and an opinionated publisher, it also has a
> readme with some discussion around this
> https://github.com/simonellistonball/metron/tree/nifi/nifi-metron-bundle).
> We can then use other nar dependencies to side load parser classes into the
> record reader. We would then need to do some fancy property validation in
> NiFi to ensure the classes were available.
>
> Also, Record Readers are much much faster. The only problem I've found with
> them is that they error on blank output, which was a problem for me writing
> a netflow 9 reader (template only records need to live in NiFi cache, but
> not be emitted).
>
> In terms of the schema objection, I'm not sure why schema focus is a
> problem. Our parsers have implicit schema and the output schema formats
> used in NiFi are very flexible and could be "just a map". That said, we
> could also take the opportunity to introduce a method to the parser
> interface to emit traits to contribute the bits of schema that a parser
> produces. This would ultimately lead to us being able to generate output
> schemas (ES, Solr, Hive, whatever which would take a lot of the pain out of
> setup for sensors).
>
> Simon
>
> On 9 August 2018 at 16:42, Otto Fowler  wrote:
>
> > I would say that
> >
> > - For each configuration parameter we want to pull in, it should be
> > explicitly configured through a property as well as through a controller
> > service that accesses the metron zk
> > - Transformations should not be conflated with parsing in those
> processors
> > or readers
> >
> > There is no on the fly configuration change in nifi ( You can’t change
> > properties once started ).
> >
> > Wouldn’t the simplest minimal start be to say that we expect either nifi
> or
> > metron and 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Otto Fowler]

Also,  If we are doing the record readers, we can have a reader for a
parser type and explicitly set the schema, as seen here :
https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-nar-bundles/nifi-standard-services/nifi-record-serialization-services-bundle/nifi-record-serialization-services/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/syslog/Syslog5424Reader.java



On August 13, 2018 at 09:26:50, Otto Fowler (ottobackwa...@gmail.com) wrote:

If we can do the record readers ourselves ( with the parsers inside them )
we can handle the returns.
I’ll be doing the net flow 5 readers once the net flow 5 processor PR ( not
mine ) is in.

I don’t think having a generic class loading parsers foo and having to
manage all that is preferable to having
an archetype and explicit parsers.

Nifi processors and readers are self documenting, and this approach will
make that not possible, as another consideration.



On August 13, 2018 at 06:50:09, Simon Elliston Ball (
si...@simonellistonball.com) wrote:

Maybe the edge use case will clarify the config issue a little. The reason
I would want to be able to push Metron parsers into NiFi would be so I can
pre-parse and filter on the edge to save bandwidth from remote locations. I
would expect to be able to parse at the edge and use NiFi to prioritise or
filter on the Metron ready data, then push through to a 'NoOp' parser in
Metron. For this to happen, we would absolutely not want to connect to
Zookeeper, so I'm +1 on Otto's suggestion that the config be embeddable in
NiFi properties. We cannot assume ZK connectivity from NiFi.

I can also see a scenario where NiFi might make it easier to chain parsers,
which is where it overlaps more with Metron. This is more about the fact
that NiFi make it a lot easier to configure and manage complex multi-step
flows than Metron, and is way more user intuitive from a design and
monitoring perspective. My main concern around using NiFi in this way is
about the load on the content repository. We are looking at a lot of
content level transformation here. You could argue that the same load is
taken off Kafka in the chaining scenario, but there is still a chance for a
user to accidentally create a lot of disk access if they go over the top
with NiFi.

I see this as potentially a a chance to make the Metron Parser interface
compatible with NiFi Record Readers. Then both communities could benefit
from sharing each other's parsers.

In terms of the NAR approach, I would say we have a base bundle of the NiFi
bits (https://github.com/simonellistonball/metron/tree/nifi already has
this for stellar, enrichments and an opinionated publisher, it also has a
readme with some discussion around this
https://github.com/simonellistonball/metron/tree/nifi/nifi-metron-bundle).
We can then use other nar dependencies to side load parser classes into the
record reader. We would then need to do some fancy property validation in
NiFi to ensure the classes were available.

Also, Record Readers are much much faster. The only problem I've found with
them is that they error on blank output, which was a problem for me writing
a netflow 9 reader (template only records need to live in NiFi cache, but
not be emitted).

In terms of the schema objection, I'm not sure why schema focus is a
problem. Our parsers have implicit schema and the output schema formats
used in NiFi are very flexible and could be "just a map". That said, we
could also take the opportunity to introduce a method to the parser
interface to emit traits to contribute the bits of schema that a parser
produces. This would ultimately lead to us being able to generate output
schemas (ES, Solr, Hive, whatever which would take a lot of the pain out of
setup for sensors).

Simon

On 9 August 2018 at 16:42, Otto Fowler  wrote:

> I would say that
>
> - For each configuration parameter we want to pull in, it should be
> explicitly configured through a property as well as through a controller
> service that accesses the metron zk
> - Transformations should not be conflated with parsing in those processors
> or readers
>
> There is no on the fly configuration change in nifi ( You can’t change
> properties once started ).
>
> Wouldn’t the simplest minimal start be to say that we expect either nifi
or
> metron and simplify things? Let nifi nifi, let metron metron.
>
>
> On August 9, 2018 at 10:53:24, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> That's definitely good info, thanks for reaching out to them about it.
>
> In terms of exposing/sharing, I don't think we have to couple them tightly
> (in fact, I think we should loosen the coupling as much as possible
without
> forcing reimplementation of things). I think there's definitely a way to
do
> that terms of the general purpose processor I proposed (or in terms of
> RecordReader or another implementation).
>
> It would definitely be easy enough to configure it to either pull from ZK
> or to use a parser config json extract as a parameter (to maintain the
same
> formatting and make 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Otto Fowler]

If we can do the record readers ourselves ( with the parsers inside them )
we can handle the returns.
I’ll be doing the net flow 5 readers once the net flow 5 processor PR ( not
mine ) is in.

I don’t think having a generic class loading parsers foo and having to
manage all that is preferable to having
an archetype and explicit parsers.

Nifi processors and readers are self documenting, and this approach will
make that not possible, as another consideration.



On August 13, 2018 at 06:50:09, Simon Elliston Ball (
si...@simonellistonball.com) wrote:

Maybe the edge use case will clarify the config issue a little. The reason
I would want to be able to push Metron parsers into NiFi would be so I can
pre-parse and filter on the edge to save bandwidth from remote locations. I
would expect to be able to parse at the edge and use NiFi to prioritise or
filter on the Metron ready data, then push through to a 'NoOp' parser in
Metron. For this to happen, we would absolutely not want to connect to
Zookeeper, so I'm +1 on Otto's suggestion that the config be embeddable in
NiFi properties. We cannot assume ZK connectivity from NiFi.

I can also see a scenario where NiFi might make it easier to chain parsers,
which is where it overlaps more with Metron. This is more about the fact
that NiFi make it a lot easier to configure and manage complex multi-step
flows than Metron, and is way more user intuitive from a design and
monitoring perspective. My main concern around using NiFi in this way is
about the load on the content repository. We are looking at a lot of
content level transformation here. You could argue that the same load is
taken off Kafka in the chaining scenario, but there is still a chance for a
user to accidentally create a lot of disk access if they go over the top
with NiFi.

I see this as potentially a a chance to make the Metron Parser interface
compatible with NiFi Record Readers. Then both communities could benefit
from sharing each other's parsers.

In terms of the NAR approach, I would say we have a base bundle of the NiFi
bits (https://github.com/simonellistonball/metron/tree/nifi already has
this for stellar, enrichments and an opinionated publisher, it also has a
readme with some discussion around this
https://github.com/simonellistonball/metron/tree/nifi/nifi-metron-bundle).
We can then use other nar dependencies to side load parser classes into the
record reader. We would then need to do some fancy property validation in
NiFi to ensure the classes were available.

Also, Record Readers are much much faster. The only problem I've found with
them is that they error on blank output, which was a problem for me writing
a netflow 9 reader (template only records need to live in NiFi cache, but
not be emitted).

In terms of the schema objection, I'm not sure why schema focus is a
problem. Our parsers have implicit schema and the output schema formats
used in NiFi are very flexible and could be "just a map". That said, we
could also take the opportunity to introduce a method to the parser
interface to emit traits to contribute the bits of schema that a parser
produces. This would ultimately lead to us being able to generate output
schemas (ES, Solr, Hive, whatever which would take a lot of the pain out of
setup for sensors).

Simon

On 9 August 2018 at 16:42, Otto Fowler  wrote:

> I would say that
>
> - For each configuration parameter we want to pull in, it should be
> explicitly configured through a property as well as through a controller
> service that accesses the metron zk
> - Transformations should not be conflated with parsing in those
processors
> or readers
>
> There is no on the fly configuration change in nifi ( You can’t change
> properties once started ).
>
> Wouldn’t the simplest minimal start be to say that we expect either nifi
or
> metron and simplify things? Let nifi nifi, let metron metron.
>
>
> On August 9, 2018 at 10:53:24, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> That's definitely good info, thanks for reaching out to them about it.
>
> In terms of exposing/sharing, I don't think we have to couple them
tightly
> (in fact, I think we should loosen the coupling as much as possible
without
> forcing reimplementation of things). I think there's definitely a way to
do
> that terms of the general purpose processor I proposed (or in terms of
> RecordReader or another implementation).
>
> It would definitely be easy enough to configure it to either pull from ZK
> or to use a parser config json extract as a parameter (to maintain the
same
> formatting and make migration easy). And we can still build specific
> NiFi-oriented parsers as needed (that manage things like Schema via the
> registry and other Nifi mechanisms). This keeps parsers entirely
decoupled
> from a metron installation.
>
> Alternatively, we extract our config handling to a module and scripts we
> can package up and easily deploy configs against ZK (or the maybe Nifi's
> StateController's or whatever). We definitely 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Simon Elliston Ball]

Maybe the edge use case will clarify the config issue a little. The reason
I would want to be able to push Metron parsers into NiFi would be so I can
pre-parse and filter on the edge to save bandwidth from remote locations. I
would expect to be able to parse at the edge and use NiFi to prioritise or
filter on the Metron ready data, then push through to a 'NoOp' parser in
Metron. For this to happen, we would absolutely not want to connect to
Zookeeper, so I'm +1 on Otto's suggestion that the config be embeddable in
NiFi properties. We cannot assume ZK connectivity from NiFi.

I can also see a scenario where NiFi might make it easier to chain parsers,
which is where it overlaps more with Metron. This is more about the fact
that NiFi make it a lot easier to configure and manage complex multi-step
flows than Metron, and is way more user intuitive from a design and
monitoring perspective. My main concern around using NiFi in this way is
about the load on the content repository. We are looking at a lot of
content level transformation here. You could argue that the same load is
taken off Kafka in the chaining scenario, but there is still a chance for a
user to accidentally create a lot of disk access if they go over the top
with NiFi.

I see this as potentially a a chance to make the Metron Parser interface
compatible with NiFi Record Readers. Then both communities could benefit
from sharing each other's parsers.

In terms of the NAR approach, I would say we have a base bundle of the NiFi
bits (https://github.com/simonellistonball/metron/tree/nifi already has
this for stellar, enrichments and an opinionated publisher, it also has a
readme with some discussion around this
https://github.com/simonellistonball/metron/tree/nifi/nifi-metron-bundle).
We can then use other nar dependencies to side load parser classes into the
record reader. We would then need to do some fancy property validation in
NiFi to ensure the classes were available.

Also, Record Readers are much much faster. The only problem I've found with
them is that they error on blank output, which was a problem for me writing
a netflow 9 reader (template only records need to live in NiFi cache, but
not be emitted).

In terms of the schema objection, I'm not sure why schema focus is a
problem. Our parsers have implicit schema and the output schema formats
used in NiFi are very flexible and could be "just a map". That said, we
could also take the opportunity to introduce a method to the parser
interface to emit traits to contribute the bits of schema that a parser
produces. This would ultimately lead to us being able to generate output
schemas (ES, Solr, Hive, whatever which would take a lot of the pain out of
setup for sensors).

Simon

On 9 August 2018 at 16:42, Otto Fowler  wrote:

> I would say that
>
> - For each configuration parameter we want to pull in, it should be
> explicitly configured through a property as well as through a controller
> service that accesses the metron zk
> - Transformations should not be conflated with parsing in those processors
> or readers
>
> There is no on the fly configuration change in nifi ( You can’t change
> properties once started ).
>
> Wouldn’t the simplest minimal start be to say that we expect either nifi or
> metron and simplify things?  Let nifi nifi, let metron metron.
>
>
> On August 9, 2018 at 10:53:24, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> That's definitely good info, thanks for reaching out to them about it.
>
> In terms of exposing/sharing, I don't think we have to couple them tightly
> (in fact, I think we should loosen the coupling as much as possible without
> forcing reimplementation of things). I think there's definitely a way to do
> that terms of the general purpose processor I proposed (or in terms of
> RecordReader or another implementation).
>
> It would definitely be easy enough to configure it to either pull from ZK
> or to use a parser config json extract as a parameter (to maintain the same
> formatting and make migration easy).  And we can still build specific
> NiFi-oriented parsers as needed (that manage things like Schema via the
> registry and other Nifi mechanisms).  This keeps parsers entirely decoupled
> from a metron installation.
>
> Alternatively, we extract our config handling to a module and scripts we
> can package up and easily deploy configs against ZK (or the maybe Nifi's
> StateController's or whatever).  We definitely shouldn't need absolutely
> everything installed to be able to run just parsers on Nifi.
>
> Having said that, right now the easiest way we have to maintain on the fly
> updatable configs (and updatable is important!) is via ZK.  Params in Nifi
> aren't quite that flexible, to the best of my knowledge (i.e. you have to
> stop, update config and restart). We might be able to exploit the
> StateController to manage this for us, but I'm honestly not familiar enough
> with it and for deployments split between NiFi and Storm, it means
> configuration 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Otto Fowler]

I would say that

- For each configuration parameter we want to pull in, it should be
explicitly configured through a property as well as through a controller
service that accesses the metron zk
- Transformations should not be conflated with parsing in those processors
or readers

There is no on the fly configuration change in nifi ( You can’t change
properties once started ).

Wouldn’t the simplest minimal start be to say that we expect either nifi or
metron and simplify things?  Let nifi nifi, let metron metron.


On August 9, 2018 at 10:53:24, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:

That's definitely good info, thanks for reaching out to them about it.

In terms of exposing/sharing, I don't think we have to couple them tightly
(in fact, I think we should loosen the coupling as much as possible without
forcing reimplementation of things). I think there's definitely a way to do
that terms of the general purpose processor I proposed (or in terms of
RecordReader or another implementation).

It would definitely be easy enough to configure it to either pull from ZK
or to use a parser config json extract as a parameter (to maintain the same
formatting and make migration easy).  And we can still build specific
NiFi-oriented parsers as needed (that manage things like Schema via the
registry and other Nifi mechanisms).  This keeps parsers entirely decoupled
from a metron installation.

Alternatively, we extract our config handling to a module and scripts we
can package up and easily deploy configs against ZK (or the maybe Nifi's
StateController's or whatever).  We definitely shouldn't need absolutely
everything installed to be able to run just parsers on Nifi.

Having said that, right now the easiest way we have to maintain on the fly
updatable configs (and updatable is important!) is via ZK.  Params in Nifi
aren't quite that flexible, to the best of my knowledge (i.e. you have to
stop, update config and restart). We might be able to exploit the
StateController to manage this for us, but I'm honestly not familiar enough
with it and for deployments split between NiFi and Storm, it means
configuration gets managed in a couple different ways (which may with users
since there is a fairly brightline delineation which makes it easier to
accept).  There some complicated configs like fieldTransforms, which is
part of why I would like things to be configured in the same format (if not
the same mechanism).

Ideally, in my mind, the parsers shared between both NiFi and Storm just
implement the very general MessageParser interface (which is pretty
minimal, a couple setup methods, validation, and the actual parse).  This
is pretty lightweight and the split of metron-parsers into
metron-parsers-common et al. would loosen the coupling between parsers and
the rest of metron into that core needed to support that.

IMO, at that point, we'd have a pretty minimal NAR (or NARs depending on
config management) that lets us run our set of parsers, lets users build
new parsers (and don't block specialized NiFi implementations that exploit
NiFi's feature set), and lets us get things configured in a relatively
consistent manner, without losing features, and hopefully requiring a
pretty minimal slice of Metron to be useful.

On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 10:06 AM Otto Fowler  wrote:

> I think the benefits are clear.  What is unclear is if the goal is to
> expose or share or re-use Metron capabilities ( stellar, parsing ) in nifi
> in a way that is native to nifi ( configured and managed in nifi ), where
> you may not even need metron ( say you just want to parse asa ) or if the
> goal is to have a hybrid approach coupling the processors/readers to the
> metron installation.
>
>
> On August 9, 2018 at 09:14:58, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> I'll add onto Mike's discussion with the original set of requirements I had
> in mind (and apply feedback on these as necessary!). This is largely
> overlap with what Mike said, but I want to make sure it's clear where my
> proposal was coming from, so we can improve on it as needed. James and
> Mike are also right, I think I skipped over the benefits of NiFi in general
> a bit, so thanks for chiming in there.
>
> - Deploy our bundled parsers without needing custom wrapping on all of
> them.
> - Don't prevent ourselves from building custom wrapping as needed.
> - Custom Java parsers with an easy way to hook in, similar to what we
> already do in Storm.
> - One stop (or at least one format) configuration, for the case when we're
> doing some thing in NiFi (parsers) and some elsewhere (enrichment and
> indexing). I don't think it'll always be "start in NiFi, end in Storm",
> especially as we build out Stellar capability, but I also don't want users
> learning a different set of configs and config tools for every platform we
> run on.
> - Ability to build out parsers and other systems fairly easily, e.g. Spark.
> - Support our current use cases (in particular parser chaining as a more
> 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Justin Leet]

That's definitely good info, thanks for reaching out to them about it.

In terms of exposing/sharing, I don't think we have to couple them tightly
(in fact, I think we should loosen the coupling as much as possible without
forcing reimplementation of things). I think there's definitely a way to do
that terms of the general purpose processor I proposed (or in terms of
RecordReader or another implementation).

It would definitely be easy enough to configure it to either pull from ZK
or to use a parser config json extract as a parameter (to maintain the same
formatting and make migration easy).  And we can still build specific
NiFi-oriented parsers as needed (that manage things like Schema via the
registry and other Nifi mechanisms).  This keeps parsers entirely decoupled
from a metron installation.

Alternatively, we extract our config handling to a module and scripts we
can package up and easily deploy configs against ZK (or the maybe Nifi's
StateController's or whatever).  We definitely shouldn't need absolutely
everything installed to be able to run just parsers on Nifi.

Having said that, right now the easiest way we have to maintain on the fly
updatable configs (and updatable is important!) is via ZK.  Params in Nifi
aren't quite that flexible, to the best of my knowledge (i.e. you have to
stop, update config and restart). We might be able to exploit the
StateController to manage this for us, but I'm honestly not familiar enough
with it and for deployments split between NiFi and Storm, it means
configuration gets managed in a couple different ways (which may with users
since there is a fairly brightline delineation which makes it easier to
accept).  There some complicated configs like fieldTransforms, which is
part of why I would like things to be configured in the same format (if not
the same mechanism).

Ideally, in my mind, the parsers shared between both NiFi and Storm just
implement the very general MessageParser interface (which is pretty
minimal, a couple setup methods, validation, and the actual parse).  This
is pretty lightweight and the split of metron-parsers into
metron-parsers-common et al. would loosen the coupling between parsers and
the rest of metron into that core needed to support that.

IMO, at that point, we'd have a pretty minimal NAR (or NARs depending on
config management) that lets us run our set of parsers, lets users build
new parsers (and don't block specialized NiFi implementations that exploit
NiFi's feature set), and lets us get things configured in a relatively
consistent manner, without losing features, and hopefully requiring a
pretty minimal slice of Metron to be useful.

On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 10:06 AM Otto Fowler  wrote:

> I think the benefits are clear.  What is unclear is if the goal is to
> expose or share or re-use Metron capabilities ( stellar, parsing ) in nifi
> in a way that is native to nifi ( configured and managed in nifi ), where
> you may not even need metron ( say you just want to parse asa ) or if the
> goal is to have a hybrid approach coupling the processors/readers to the
> metron installation.
>
>
> On August 9, 2018 at 09:14:58, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> I'll add onto Mike's discussion with the original set of requirements I
> had
> in mind (and apply feedback on these as necessary!). This is largely
> overlap with what Mike said, but I want to make sure it's clear where my
> proposal was coming from, so we can improve on it as needed. James and
> Mike are also right, I think I skipped over the benefits of NiFi in
> general
> a bit, so thanks for chiming in there.
>
> - Deploy our bundled parsers without needing custom wrapping on all of
> them.
> - Don't prevent ourselves from building custom wrapping as needed.
> - Custom Java parsers with an easy way to hook in, similar to what we
> already do in Storm.
> - One stop (or at least one format) configuration, for the case when we're
> doing some thing in NiFi (parsers) and some elsewhere (enrichment and
> indexing). I don't think it'll always be "start in NiFi, end in Storm",
> especially as we build out Stellar capability, but I also don't want users
> learning a different set of configs and config tools for every platform we
> run on.
> - Ability to build out parsers and other systems fairly easily, e.g.
> Spark.
> - Support our current use cases (in particular parser chaining as a more
> advanced use case).
>
> It really boils down to providing a relatively simple user path to be able
> to migrate to NiFi as needed or desired as simply as possible in a very
> general way, while not preventing parser by parser enhancements.
>
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 7:14 PM Michael Miklavcic <
> michael.miklav...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I think it also provides customers greater control over their
> architecture
> > by giving them the flexibility to choose where/how to host their
> parsers.
> >
> > To Justin's point about the API, my biggest concern about the
> RecordReader
> > approach is 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Otto Fowler]

I think the benefits are clear.  What is unclear is if the goal is to
expose or share or re-use Metron capabilities ( stellar, parsing ) in nifi
in a way that is native to nifi ( configured and managed in nifi ), where
you may not even need metron ( say you just want to parse asa ) or if the
goal is to have a hybrid approach coupling the processors/readers to the
metron installation.


On August 9, 2018 at 09:14:58, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:

I'll add onto Mike's discussion with the original set of requirements I had
in mind (and apply feedback on these as necessary!). This is largely
overlap with what Mike said, but I want to make sure it's clear where my
proposal was coming from, so we can improve on it as needed. James and
Mike are also right, I think I skipped over the benefits of NiFi in general
a bit, so thanks for chiming in there.

- Deploy our bundled parsers without needing custom wrapping on all of
them.
- Don't prevent ourselves from building custom wrapping as needed.
- Custom Java parsers with an easy way to hook in, similar to what we
already do in Storm.
- One stop (or at least one format) configuration, for the case when we're
doing some thing in NiFi (parsers) and some elsewhere (enrichment and
indexing). I don't think it'll always be "start in NiFi, end in Storm",
especially as we build out Stellar capability, but I also don't want users
learning a different set of configs and config tools for every platform we
run on.
- Ability to build out parsers and other systems fairly easily, e.g. Spark.
- Support our current use cases (in particular parser chaining as a more
advanced use case).

It really boils down to providing a relatively simple user path to be able
to migrate to NiFi as needed or desired as simply as possible in a very
general way, while not preventing parser by parser enhancements.

On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 7:14 PM Michael Miklavcic <
michael.miklav...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it also provides customers greater control over their
architecture
> by giving them the flexibility to choose where/how to host their parsers.
>
> To Justin's point about the API, my biggest concern about the
RecordReader
> approach is that it is not stable. We already have a similar problem in
> having the TransportClient in ElasticSearch - they are prone to changing
it
> in minor versions with the advent of their newer REST API, which is
> problematic for ensuring a stable installation.
>
> From my own perspective, our goal with NiFi, at least in part, should be
> the ability to deploy our core parsing infrastructure, i.e.
>
> - pre-built parsers
> - custom java parsers
> - Stellar transforms
> - custom stellar transforms
>
> And have the ability to configure it similarly to how we configure
parsers
> within Storm. Consistent with our recent parser chaining and aggregation
> feature, users should be able to construct and deploy similar constructs
in
> NiFi. The core architectural shift would be that parser code should be
> platform agnostic. We provide the plumbing in Storm, NiFi, and  Streaming?, other> and platform architects and devops teams can choose
how
> and where to deploy.
>
> Best,
> Mike
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 9:57 AM James Sirota  wrote:
>
> > Integration with NiFi would be useful for parsing low-volume
telemetries
> > at the edge. This is a much more resource friendly way to do it than
> > setting up dedicated storm topologies. The integration would be that
the
> > NiFi processor parses the data and pushes it straight into the
enrichment
> > topic, saving us the resources of having multiple parsers in storm
> >
> > Thanks,
> > James
> >
> > 07.08.2018, 11:29, "Otto Fowler" :
> > > Why do we start over. We are going back and forth on implementation,
> and
> > I
> > > don’t think we have the same goals or concerns.
> > >
> > > What would be the requirements or goals of metron integration with
> Nifi?
> > > How many levels or options for integration do we have?
> > > What are the approaches to choose from?
> > > Who are the target users?
> > >
> > > On August 7, 2018 at 12:24:56, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com)
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > So how does the MetronRecordReader roll into everything? It seems
like
> > it'd
> > > be more useful on the reader per format approach, but otherwise it
> > doesn't
> > > really seem like we gain much, and it requires getting everything
> linked
> > up
> > > properly to be used. Assuming we looked at doing it that way, is the
> idea
> > > that we'd setup a ControllerService with the MetronRecordReader and a
> > > MetronRecordWriter and then have the StellarTransformRecord processor
> > > configured with those ControllerServices? How do we manage the
> > > configurations of the everything that way? How does the
> ControllerService
> > > get configured with whatever parser(s) are needed in the flow?
> Basically,
> > > what's your vision for how everything would tie together?
> > >
> > > I also forgot to mention this in the original 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Otto Fowler]

I reached out to the nifi list about the Record api ‘stability'

On August 9, 2018 at 09:54:22, Bryan Bende (bbe...@gmail.com) wrote:

I don't think there are any stability issues with the record API, it
is definitely recommended to use the record approach where it makes
sense.

That comment was probably put there on the first release and never
removed, and now it has been 4-5 releases later.

As a general comment to APIs, the record stuff is part of a controller
service API, and not part of the framework API, so I do think there is
more freedom to change the API on minor releases if needed, however I
don't see any major changes to the record stuff happening.

On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 5:58 AM, Mike Thomsen 
wrote:
> I think that comment is no longer valid. Heck PutHBaseRecord started as
> part of a project at my company in early 2017 and we found it perfectly
> stable back then.
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 11:46 PM Otto Fowler 
wrote:
>
>> I’m seeing
>>
>>
https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-commons/nifi-record/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/serialization/RecordReader.java#L34

>> being quoted as a reason to NOT build Record based processors but
instead
>> stick with the original Processor api.
>>
>> Yet, on list and on hipchat and in pr’s I’ve seen the Record approach
being
>> promoted heavily.
>>
>> Is this comment still correct? Is the API not considered stable?
>> Would the NiFi project recommend building externally hosted NiFi
components
>> using the Record API?
>>
>> ottO
>>



On August 9, 2018 at 09:14:58, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:

I'll add onto Mike's discussion with the original set of requirements I had
in mind (and apply feedback on these as necessary!). This is largely
overlap with what Mike said, but I want to make sure it's clear where my
proposal was coming from, so we can improve on it as needed. James and
Mike are also right, I think I skipped over the benefits of NiFi in general
a bit, so thanks for chiming in there.

- Deploy our bundled parsers without needing custom wrapping on all of
them.
- Don't prevent ourselves from building custom wrapping as needed.
- Custom Java parsers with an easy way to hook in, similar to what we
already do in Storm.
- One stop (or at least one format) configuration, for the case when we're
doing some thing in NiFi (parsers) and some elsewhere (enrichment and
indexing). I don't think it'll always be "start in NiFi, end in Storm",
especially as we build out Stellar capability, but I also don't want users
learning a different set of configs and config tools for every platform we
run on.
- Ability to build out parsers and other systems fairly easily, e.g. Spark.
- Support our current use cases (in particular parser chaining as a more
advanced use case).

It really boils down to providing a relatively simple user path to be able
to migrate to NiFi as needed or desired as simply as possible in a very
general way, while not preventing parser by parser enhancements.

On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 7:14 PM Michael Miklavcic <
michael.miklav...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it also provides customers greater control over their
architecture
> by giving them the flexibility to choose where/how to host their parsers.
>
> To Justin's point about the API, my biggest concern about the
RecordReader
> approach is that it is not stable. We already have a similar problem in
> having the TransportClient in ElasticSearch - they are prone to changing
it
> in minor versions with the advent of their newer REST API, which is
> problematic for ensuring a stable installation.
>
> From my own perspective, our goal with NiFi, at least in part, should be
> the ability to deploy our core parsing infrastructure, i.e.
>
> - pre-built parsers
> - custom java parsers
> - Stellar transforms
> - custom stellar transforms
>
> And have the ability to configure it similarly to how we configure
parsers
> within Storm. Consistent with our recent parser chaining and aggregation
> feature, users should be able to construct and deploy similar constructs
in
> NiFi. The core architectural shift would be that parser code should be
> platform agnostic. We provide the plumbing in Storm, NiFi, and  Streaming?, other> and platform architects and devops teams can choose
how
> and where to deploy.
>
> Best,
> Mike
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 9:57 AM James Sirota  wrote:
>
> > Integration with NiFi would be useful for parsing low-volume
telemetries
> > at the edge. This is a much more resource friendly way to do it than
> > setting up dedicated storm topologies. The integration would be that
the
> > NiFi processor parses the data and pushes it straight into the
enrichment
> > topic, saving us the resources of having multiple parsers in storm
> >
> > Thanks,
> > James
> >
> > 07.08.2018, 11:29, "Otto Fowler" :
> > > Why do we start over. We are going back and forth on implementation,
> and
> > I
> > > don’t think we have the same goals or concerns.
> > >
> > > What would be the requirements or 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Justin Leet]

I'll add onto Mike's discussion with the original set of requirements I had
in mind (and apply feedback on these as necessary!). This is largely
overlap with what Mike said, but I want to make sure it's clear where my
proposal was coming from, so we can improve on it as needed.  James and
Mike are also right, I think I skipped over the benefits of NiFi in general
a bit, so thanks for chiming in there.

- Deploy our bundled parsers without needing custom wrapping on all of them.
- Don't prevent ourselves from building custom wrapping as needed.
- Custom Java parsers with an easy way to hook in, similar to what we
already do in Storm.
- One stop (or at least one format) configuration, for the case when we're
doing some thing in NiFi (parsers) and some elsewhere (enrichment and
indexing). I don't think it'll always be "start in NiFi, end in Storm",
especially as we build out Stellar capability, but I also don't want users
learning a different set of configs and config tools for every platform we
run on.
- Ability to build out parsers and other systems fairly easily, e.g. Spark.
- Support our current use cases (in particular parser chaining as a more
advanced use case).

It really boils down to providing a relatively simple user path to be able
to migrate to NiFi as needed or desired as simply as possible in a very
general way, while not preventing parser by parser enhancements.

On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 7:14 PM Michael Miklavcic <
michael.miklav...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it also provides customers greater control over their architecture
> by giving them the flexibility to choose where/how to host their parsers.
>
> To Justin's point about the API, my biggest concern about the RecordReader
> approach is that it is not stable. We already have a similar problem in
> having the TransportClient in ElasticSearch - they are prone to changing it
> in minor versions with the advent of their newer REST API, which is
> problematic for ensuring a stable installation.
>
> From my own perspective, our goal with NiFi, at least in part, should be
> the ability to deploy our core parsing infrastructure, i.e.
>
>- pre-built parsers
>- custom java parsers
>- Stellar transforms
>- custom stellar transforms
>
> And have the ability to configure it similarly to how we configure parsers
> within Storm. Consistent with our recent parser chaining and aggregation
> feature, users should be able to construct and deploy similar constructs in
> NiFi. The core architectural shift would be that parser code should be
> platform agnostic. We provide the plumbing in Storm, NiFi, and  Streaming?, other> and platform architects and devops teams can choose how
> and where to deploy.
>
> Best,
> Mike
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 9:57 AM James Sirota  wrote:
>
> > Integration with NiFi would be useful for parsing low-volume telemetries
> > at the edge.  This is a much more resource friendly way to do it than
> > setting up dedicated storm topologies.  The integration would be that the
> > NiFi processor parses the data and pushes it straight into the enrichment
> > topic, saving us the resources of having multiple parsers in storm
> >
> > Thanks,
> > James
> >
> > 07.08.2018, 11:29, "Otto Fowler" :
> > > Why do we start over. We are going back and forth on implementation,
> and
> > I
> > > don’t think we have the same goals or concerns.
> > >
> > > What would be the requirements or goals of metron integration with
> Nifi?
> > > How many levels or options for integration do we have?
> > > What are the approaches to choose from?
> > > Who are the target users?
> > >
> > > On August 7, 2018 at 12:24:56, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com)
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > So how does the MetronRecordReader roll into everything? It seems like
> > it'd
> > > be more useful on the reader per format approach, but otherwise it
> > doesn't
> > > really seem like we gain much, and it requires getting everything
> linked
> > up
> > > properly to be used. Assuming we looked at doing it that way, is the
> idea
> > > that we'd setup a ControllerService with the MetronRecordReader and a
> > > MetronRecordWriter and then have the StellarTransformRecord processor
> > > configured with those ControllerServices? How do we manage the
> > > configurations of the everything that way? How does the
> ControllerService
> > > get configured with whatever parser(s) are needed in the flow?
> Basically,
> > > what's your vision for how everything would tie together?
> > >
> > > I also forgot to mention this in the original writeup, but there's
> > another
> > > reason to avoid the RecordReader: It's not considered stable. See
> > >
> >
> https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-commons/nifi-record/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/serialization/RecordReader.java#L34
> > .
> > > That alone makes me super hesitant to use it, if it can shift out from
> > > under us in even in incremental version.
> > >
> > > I'm also unclear on why StellarTransformRecord processor 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Michael Miklavcic]

I think it also provides customers greater control over their architecture
by giving them the flexibility to choose where/how to host their parsers.

To Justin's point about the API, my biggest concern about the RecordReader
approach is that it is not stable. We already have a similar problem in
having the TransportClient in ElasticSearch - they are prone to changing it
in minor versions with the advent of their newer REST API, which is
problematic for ensuring a stable installation.

>From my own perspective, our goal with NiFi, at least in part, should be
the ability to deploy our core parsing infrastructure, i.e.

   - pre-built parsers
   - custom java parsers
   - Stellar transforms
   - custom stellar transforms

And have the ability to configure it similarly to how we configure parsers
within Storm. Consistent with our recent parser chaining and aggregation
feature, users should be able to construct and deploy similar constructs in
NiFi. The core architectural shift would be that parser code should be
platform agnostic. We provide the plumbing in Storm, NiFi, and  and platform architects and devops teams can choose how
and where to deploy.

Best,
Mike


On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 9:57 AM James Sirota  wrote:

> Integration with NiFi would be useful for parsing low-volume telemetries
> at the edge.  This is a much more resource friendly way to do it than
> setting up dedicated storm topologies.  The integration would be that the
> NiFi processor parses the data and pushes it straight into the enrichment
> topic, saving us the resources of having multiple parsers in storm
>
> Thanks,
> James
>
> 07.08.2018, 11:29, "Otto Fowler" :
> > Why do we start over. We are going back and forth on implementation, and
> I
> > don’t think we have the same goals or concerns.
> >
> > What would be the requirements or goals of metron integration with Nifi?
> > How many levels or options for integration do we have?
> > What are the approaches to choose from?
> > Who are the target users?
> >
> > On August 7, 2018 at 12:24:56, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com)
> wrote:
> >
> > So how does the MetronRecordReader roll into everything? It seems like
> it'd
> > be more useful on the reader per format approach, but otherwise it
> doesn't
> > really seem like we gain much, and it requires getting everything linked
> up
> > properly to be used. Assuming we looked at doing it that way, is the idea
> > that we'd setup a ControllerService with the MetronRecordReader and a
> > MetronRecordWriter and then have the StellarTransformRecord processor
> > configured with those ControllerServices? How do we manage the
> > configurations of the everything that way? How does the ControllerService
> > get configured with whatever parser(s) are needed in the flow? Basically,
> > what's your vision for how everything would tie together?
> >
> > I also forgot to mention this in the original writeup, but there's
> another
> > reason to avoid the RecordReader: It's not considered stable. See
> >
> https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-commons/nifi-record/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/serialization/RecordReader.java#L34
> .
> > That alone makes me super hesitant to use it, if it can shift out from
> > under us in even in incremental version.
> >
> > I'm also unclear on why StellarTransformRecord processor matters for
> either
> > approach. With the Processor approach you could simply follow it up with
> > the Stellar processor, the same way you'd would in the RecordReader
> > approach. The Stellar processor should be a parallel improvement, not a
> > conflicting one.
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 11:50 AM Otto Fowler 
> wrote:
> >
> >>  A Metron Processor itself isn’t really necessary. A MetronRecordReader
> (
> >>  either the megalithic or a reader per format ) would be a good
> approach.
> >>  Then have StellarTransformRecord processor that can do Stellar on _any_
> >>  record, regardless of source.
> >>
> >>  On August 7, 2018 at 11:06:22, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com)
> wrote:
> >>
> >>  Thanks for the comments, Otto, this is definitely great feedback. I'd
> >>  love to respond inline, but the email's already starting to lose it's
> >>  formatting, so I'll go with the classic "wall of text". Let me know if
> I
> >>  didn't address everything.
> >>
> >>  Loading modules (or jars or whatever) outside of our Processor gives us
> >>  the benefit of making it incredibly easy for a users to create their
> own
> >>  parsers. I would definitely expect our own bundled parsers to be
> included
> >>  in our base NAR, but loading modules enables users to only have to
> learn
> >>  how Metron wants our stuff lined up and just plug it in. Having said
> that,
> >>  I could see having a wrapper for our bundled parsers that makes it
> really
> >>  easy to just say you want an MetronAsaParser or MetronBroParser, etc.
> That
> >>  would give us the best of both worlds, where it's easy to get setup our
> >>  bundled parsers and also trivial to 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[James Sirota]

Integration with NiFi would be useful for parsing low-volume telemetries at the 
edge.  This is a much more resource friendly way to do it than setting up 
dedicated storm topologies.  The integration would be that the NiFi processor 
parses the data and pushes it straight into the enrichment topic, saving us the 
resources of having multiple parsers in storm

Thanks,
James 

07.08.2018, 11:29, "Otto Fowler" :
> Why do we start over. We are going back and forth on implementation, and I
> don’t think we have the same goals or concerns.
>
> What would be the requirements or goals of metron integration with Nifi?
> How many levels or options for integration do we have?
> What are the approaches to choose from?
> Who are the target users?
>
> On August 7, 2018 at 12:24:56, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> So how does the MetronRecordReader roll into everything? It seems like it'd
> be more useful on the reader per format approach, but otherwise it doesn't
> really seem like we gain much, and it requires getting everything linked up
> properly to be used. Assuming we looked at doing it that way, is the idea
> that we'd setup a ControllerService with the MetronRecordReader and a
> MetronRecordWriter and then have the StellarTransformRecord processor
> configured with those ControllerServices? How do we manage the
> configurations of the everything that way? How does the ControllerService
> get configured with whatever parser(s) are needed in the flow? Basically,
> what's your vision for how everything would tie together?
>
> I also forgot to mention this in the original writeup, but there's another
> reason to avoid the RecordReader: It's not considered stable. See
> https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-commons/nifi-record/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/serialization/RecordReader.java#L34.
> That alone makes me super hesitant to use it, if it can shift out from
> under us in even in incremental version.
>
> I'm also unclear on why StellarTransformRecord processor matters for either
> approach. With the Processor approach you could simply follow it up with
> the Stellar processor, the same way you'd would in the RecordReader
> approach. The Stellar processor should be a parallel improvement, not a
> conflicting one.
>
> On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 11:50 AM Otto Fowler  wrote:
>
>>  A Metron Processor itself isn’t really necessary. A MetronRecordReader (
>>  either the megalithic or a reader per format ) would be a good approach.
>>  Then have StellarTransformRecord processor that can do Stellar on _any_
>>  record, regardless of source.
>>
>>  On August 7, 2018 at 11:06:22, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>>
>>  Thanks for the comments, Otto, this is definitely great feedback. I'd
>>  love to respond inline, but the email's already starting to lose it's
>>  formatting, so I'll go with the classic "wall of text". Let me know if I
>>  didn't address everything.
>>
>>  Loading modules (or jars or whatever) outside of our Processor gives us
>>  the benefit of making it incredibly easy for a users to create their own
>>  parsers. I would definitely expect our own bundled parsers to be included
>>  in our base NAR, but loading modules enables users to only have to learn
>>  how Metron wants our stuff lined up and just plug it in. Having said that,
>>  I could see having a wrapper for our bundled parsers that makes it really
>>  easy to just say you want an MetronAsaParser or MetronBroParser, etc. That
>>  would give us the best of both worlds, where it's easy to get setup our
>>  bundled parsers and also trivial to pull in non-bundled parsers. What
>>  doing this gives us is an easy way to support (hopefully) every parser that
>>  gets made, right out of the box, without us needing to build a specialized
>>  version of everything until we decide to and without users having to jump
>>  through hoops.
>>
>>  None of this prevents anyone from creating specialized parsers (for perf
>>  reasons, or to use the schema registries, or anything else). It's probably
>>  worthwhile to package up some of built-in parsers and customize them to use
>>  more specialized feature appropriately as we see things get used in the
>>  wild. Like you said, we could likely provide Avro schemas for some of this
>>  and give users a more robust experience on what we choose to support and
>>  provide guidance for other things. I'm also worried that building
>>  specialized schemas becomes problematic for things like parser chaining
>>  (where our routers wrap the underlying messages and add on their own info).
>>  Going down that road potentially requires anything wrapped to have a
>>  specialized schema for the wrapped version in addition to a vanilla version
>>  (although please correct me if I'm missing something there, I'll openly
>>  admit to some shakiness on how that would be handled).
>>
>>  I also disagree that this is un-Nifi-like, although I'm admittedly not as
>>  skilled there. The basis for doing this 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Otto Fowler]

Why do we start over.  We are going back and forth on implementation, and I
don’t think we have the same goals or concerns.

What would be the requirements or goals of metron integration with Nifi?
How many levels or options for integration do we have?
What are the approaches to choose from?
Who are the target users?



On August 7, 2018 at 12:24:56, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:

So how does the MetronRecordReader roll into everything? It seems like it'd
be more useful on the reader per format approach, but otherwise it doesn't
really seem like we gain much, and it requires getting everything linked up
properly to be used. Assuming we looked at doing it that way, is the idea
that we'd setup a ControllerService with the MetronRecordReader and a
MetronRecordWriter and then have the StellarTransformRecord processor
configured with those ControllerServices? How do we manage the
configurations of the everything that way?  How does the ControllerService
get configured with whatever parser(s) are needed in the flow? Basically,
what's your vision for how everything would tie together?

I also forgot to mention this in the original writeup, but there's another
reason to avoid the RecordReader: It's not considered stable. See
https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-commons/nifi-record/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/serialization/RecordReader.java#L34.
That alone makes me super hesitant to use it, if it can shift out from
under us in even in incremental version.

I'm also unclear on why StellarTransformRecord processor matters for either
approach.  With the Processor approach you could simply follow it up with
the Stellar processor, the same way you'd would in the RecordReader
approach.  The Stellar processor should be a parallel improvement, not a
conflicting one.

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 11:50 AM Otto Fowler  wrote:

> A Metron Processor itself isn’t really necessary.  A MetronRecordReader (
> either the megalithic or a reader per format ) would be a good approach.
> Then have StellarTransformRecord processor that can do Stellar on _any_
> record, regardless of source.
>
>
>
>
> On August 7, 2018 at 11:06:22, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> Thanks for the comments, Otto, this is definitely great feedback.  I'd
> love to respond inline, but the email's already starting to lose it's
> formatting, so I'll go with the classic "wall of text".  Let me know if I
> didn't address everything.
>
> Loading modules (or jars or whatever) outside of our Processor gives us
> the benefit of making it incredibly easy for a users to create their own
> parsers. I would definitely expect our own bundled parsers to be included
> in our base NAR, but loading modules enables users to only have to learn
> how Metron wants our stuff lined up and just plug it in. Having said that,
> I could see having a wrapper for our bundled parsers that makes it really
> easy to just say you want an MetronAsaParser or MetronBroParser, etc. That
> would give us the best of both worlds, where it's easy to get setup our
> bundled parsers and also trivial to pull in non-bundled parsers. What
> doing this gives us is an easy way to support (hopefully) every parser that
> gets made, right out of the box, without us needing to build a specialized
> version of everything until we decide to and without users having to jump
> through hoops.
>
> None of this prevents anyone from creating specialized parsers (for perf
> reasons, or to use the schema registries, or anything else).  It's probably
> worthwhile to package up some of built-in parsers and customize them to use
> more specialized feature appropriately as we see things get used in the
> wild.  Like you said, we could likely provide Avro schemas for some of this
> and give users a more robust experience on what we choose to support and
> provide guidance for other things.  I'm also worried that building
> specialized schemas becomes problematic for things like parser chaining
> (where our routers wrap the underlying messages and add on their own info).
> Going down that road potentially requires anything wrapped to have a
> specialized schema for the wrapped version in addition to a vanilla version
> (although please correct me if I'm missing something there, I'll openly
> admit to some shakiness on how that would be handled).
>
> I also disagree that this is un-Nifi-like, although I'm admittedly not as
> skilled there.  The basis for doing this is directly inspired by the
> JoltTransformer, which is extremely similar to the proposed setup for our
> parsers: Simply take a spec (in this case the configs, including the
> fieldTransformations), and delegate a mapping from bytes[] to JSON.  The
> Jolt library even has an Expression Language (check out
> https://community.hortonworks.com/articles/105965/expression-language-with-jolt-in-apache-nifi.html),
> so it's not a foreign concept. I believe Simon Ball has already done some
> experimenting around with getting Stellar 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Justin Leet]

So how does the MetronRecordReader roll into everything? It seems like it'd
be more useful on the reader per format approach, but otherwise it doesn't
really seem like we gain much, and it requires getting everything linked up
properly to be used. Assuming we looked at doing it that way, is the idea
that we'd setup a ControllerService with the MetronRecordReader and a
MetronRecordWriter and then have the StellarTransformRecord processor
configured with those ControllerServices? How do we manage the
configurations of the everything that way?  How does the ControllerService
get configured with whatever parser(s) are needed in the flow? Basically,
what's your vision for how everything would tie together?

I also forgot to mention this in the original writeup, but there's another
reason to avoid the RecordReader: It's not considered stable. See
https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-commons/nifi-record/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/serialization/RecordReader.java#L34.
That alone makes me super hesitant to use it, if it can shift out from
under us in even in incremental version.

I'm also unclear on why StellarTransformRecord processor matters for either
approach.  With the Processor approach you could simply follow it up with
the Stellar processor, the same way you'd would in the RecordReader
approach.  The Stellar processor should be a parallel improvement, not a
conflicting one.

On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 11:50 AM Otto Fowler  wrote:

> A Metron Processor itself isn’t really necessary.  A MetronRecordReader (
> either the megalithic or a reader per format ) would be a good approach.
> Then have StellarTransformRecord processor that can do Stellar on _any_
> record, regardless of source.
>
>
>
>
> On August 7, 2018 at 11:06:22, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> Thanks for the comments, Otto, this is definitely great feedback.  I'd
> love to respond inline, but the email's already starting to lose it's
> formatting, so I'll go with the classic "wall of text".  Let me know if I
> didn't address everything.
>
> Loading modules (or jars or whatever) outside of our Processor gives us
> the benefit of making it incredibly easy for a users to create their own
> parsers. I would definitely expect our own bundled parsers to be included
> in our base NAR, but loading modules enables users to only have to learn
> how Metron wants our stuff lined up and just plug it in. Having said that,
> I could see having a wrapper for our bundled parsers that makes it really
> easy to just say you want an MetronAsaParser or MetronBroParser, etc. That
> would give us the best of both worlds, where it's easy to get setup our
> bundled parsers and also trivial to pull in non-bundled parsers. What
> doing this gives us is an easy way to support (hopefully) every parser that
> gets made, right out of the box, without us needing to build a specialized
> version of everything until we decide to and without users having to jump
> through hoops.
>
> None of this prevents anyone from creating specialized parsers (for perf
> reasons, or to use the schema registries, or anything else).  It's probably
> worthwhile to package up some of built-in parsers and customize them to use
> more specialized feature appropriately as we see things get used in the
> wild.  Like you said, we could likely provide Avro schemas for some of this
> and give users a more robust experience on what we choose to support and
> provide guidance for other things.  I'm also worried that building
> specialized schemas becomes problematic for things like parser chaining
> (where our routers wrap the underlying messages and add on their own info).
> Going down that road potentially requires anything wrapped to have a
> specialized schema for the wrapped version in addition to a vanilla version
> (although please correct me if I'm missing something there, I'll openly
> admit to some shakiness on how that would be handled).
>
> I also disagree that this is un-Nifi-like, although I'm admittedly not as
> skilled there.  The basis for doing this is directly inspired by the
> JoltTransformer, which is extremely similar to the proposed setup for our
> parsers: Simply take a spec (in this case the configs, including the
> fieldTransformations), and delegate a mapping from bytes[] to JSON.  The
> Jolt library even has an Expression Language (check out
> https://community.hortonworks.com/articles/105965/expression-language-with-jolt-in-apache-nifi.html),
> so it's not a foreign concept. I believe Simon Ball has already done some
> experimenting around with getting Stellar running in NiFi, and I'd love to
> see Stellar more readily available in NiFi in general.
>
> Re: the ControllerService, I see this as a way to maintain Metron's use of
> ZK as the source of config truth.  Users could definitely be using NiFi and
> Storm in tandem (parse in NiFi + enrich and index from Storm, for
> example).  Using the ControllerService gives us a ZK instance as the single
> source 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Otto Fowler]

A Metron Processor itself isn’t really necessary.  A MetronRecordReader (
either the megalithic or a reader per format ) would be a good approach.
Then have StellarTransformRecord processor that can do Stellar on _any_
record, regardless of source.




On August 7, 2018 at 11:06:22, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:

Thanks for the comments, Otto, this is definitely great feedback.  I'd love
to respond inline, but the email's already starting to lose it's
formatting, so I'll go with the classic "wall of text".  Let me know if I
didn't address everything.

Loading modules (or jars or whatever) outside of our Processor gives us the
benefit of making it incredibly easy for a users to create their own
parsers. I would definitely expect our own bundled parsers to be included
in our base NAR, but loading modules enables users to only have to learn
how Metron wants our stuff lined up and just plug it in. Having said that,
I could see having a wrapper for our bundled parsers that makes it really
easy to just say you want an MetronAsaParser or MetronBroParser, etc. That
would give us the best of both worlds, where it's easy to get setup our
bundled parsers and also trivial to pull in non-bundled parsers. What doing
this gives us is an easy way to support (hopefully) every parser that gets
made, right out of the box, without us needing to build a specialized
version of everything until we decide to and without users having to jump
through hoops.

None of this prevents anyone from creating specialized parsers (for perf
reasons, or to use the schema registries, or anything else).  It's probably
worthwhile to package up some of built-in parsers and customize them to use
more specialized feature appropriately as we see things get used in the
wild.  Like you said, we could likely provide Avro schemas for some of this
and give users a more robust experience on what we choose to support and
provide guidance for other things.  I'm also worried that building
specialized schemas becomes problematic for things like parser chaining
(where our routers wrap the underlying messages and add on their own info).
Going down that road potentially requires anything wrapped to have a
specialized schema for the wrapped version in addition to a vanilla version
(although please correct me if I'm missing something there, I'll openly
admit to some shakiness on how that would be handled).

I also disagree that this is un-Nifi-like, although I'm admittedly not as
skilled there.  The basis for doing this is directly inspired by the
JoltTransformer, which is extremely similar to the proposed setup for our
parsers: Simply take a spec (in this case the configs, including the
fieldTransformations), and delegate a mapping from bytes[] to JSON.  The
Jolt library even has an Expression Language (check out
https://community.hortonworks.com/articles/105965/expression-language-with-jolt-in-apache-nifi.html),
so it's not a foreign concept. I believe Simon Ball has already done some
experimenting around with getting Stellar running in NiFi, and I'd love to
see Stellar more readily available in NiFi in general.

Re: the ControllerService, I see this as a way to maintain Metron's use of
ZK as the source of config truth.  Users could definitely be using NiFi and
Storm in tandem (parse in NiFi + enrich and index from Storm, for
example).  Using the ControllerService gives us a ZK instance as the single
source of truth.  That way we aren't forcing users to go to two different
places to manage configs.  This also lets us leverage our existing scripts
and our existing infrastructure around configs and their management and
validation very easily.  It also gives users a way to port from NiFi to
Storm or vice-versa without having to migrate configs as well. We could
also provide the option to configure the Processor itself with the data
(just don't set up a controller service and provide the json or whatever as
one of our properties).


On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 10:12 AM Otto Fowler  wrote:

> I think this is a good idea.  As I mentioned in the other thread I’ve been
> doing a lot of work on Nifi recently.
> I think the important thing is that what is done should be done the NiFi
> way, not bolting the Metron composition
> onto Nifi.  Think of it like the Tao of Unix, the parsers and components
> should be single purpose and simple, allowing
> exceptional flexibility in composition.
>
> Comments inline.
>
> On August 7, 2018 at 09:27:01, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> There's interest in being able to run Metron parsers in NiFi, rather than
> inside Storm. I dug into this a bit, and have some thoughts on how we could
>
> go about this. I'd love feedback on this, along with anything we'd
> consider must haves as well as future enhancements.
>
> 1. Separate metron-parsers into metron-parsers-common and metron-storm
> and create metron-parsers-nifi. For this code to be reusable across
> platforms (NiFi, Storm, and anything else in the 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Justin Leet]

Thanks for the comments, Otto, this is definitely great feedback.  I'd love
to respond inline, but the email's already starting to lose it's
formatting, so I'll go with the classic "wall of text".  Let me know if I
didn't address everything.

Loading modules (or jars or whatever) outside of our Processor gives us the
benefit of making it incredibly easy for a users to create their own
parsers. I would definitely expect our own bundled parsers to be included
in our base NAR, but loading modules enables users to only have to learn
how Metron wants our stuff lined up and just plug it in. Having said that,
I could see having a wrapper for our bundled parsers that makes it really
easy to just say you want an MetronAsaParser or MetronBroParser, etc. That
would give us the best of both worlds, where it's easy to get setup our
bundled parsers and also trivial to pull in non-bundled parsers. What doing
this gives us is an easy way to support (hopefully) every parser that gets
made, right out of the box, without us needing to build a specialized
version of everything until we decide to and without users having to jump
through hoops.

None of this prevents anyone from creating specialized parsers (for perf
reasons, or to use the schema registries, or anything else).  It's probably
worthwhile to package up some of built-in parsers and customize them to use
more specialized feature appropriately as we see things get used in the
wild.  Like you said, we could likely provide Avro schemas for some of this
and give users a more robust experience on what we choose to support and
provide guidance for other things.  I'm also worried that building
specialized schemas becomes problematic for things like parser chaining
(where our routers wrap the underlying messages and add on their own info).
Going down that road potentially requires anything wrapped to have a
specialized schema for the wrapped version in addition to a vanilla version
(although please correct me if I'm missing something there, I'll openly
admit to some shakiness on how that would be handled).

I also disagree that this is un-Nifi-like, although I'm admittedly not as
skilled there.  The basis for doing this is directly inspired by the
JoltTransformer, which is extremely similar to the proposed setup for our
parsers: Simply take a spec (in this case the configs, including the
fieldTransformations), and delegate a mapping from bytes[] to JSON.  The
Jolt library even has an Expression Language (check out
https://community.hortonworks.com/articles/105965/expression-language-with-jolt-in-apache-nifi.html),
so it's not a foreign concept. I believe Simon Ball has already done some
experimenting around with getting Stellar running in NiFi, and I'd love to
see Stellar more readily available in NiFi in general.

Re: the ControllerService, I see this as a way to maintain Metron's use of
ZK as the source of config truth.  Users could definitely be using NiFi and
Storm in tandem (parse in NiFi + enrich and index from Storm, for
example).  Using the ControllerService gives us a ZK instance as the single
source of truth.  That way we aren't forcing users to go to two different
places to manage configs.  This also lets us leverage our existing scripts
and our existing infrastructure around configs and their management and
validation very easily.  It also gives users a way to port from NiFi to
Storm or vice-versa without having to migrate configs as well. We could
also provide the option to configure the Processor itself with the data
(just don't set up a controller service and provide the json or whatever as
one of our properties).


On Tue, Aug 7, 2018 at 10:12 AM Otto Fowler  wrote:

> I think this is a good idea.  As I mentioned in the other thread I’ve been
> doing a lot of work on Nifi recently.
> I think the important thing is that what is done should be done the NiFi
> way, not bolting the Metron composition
> onto Nifi.  Think of it like the Tao of Unix, the parsers and components
> should be single purpose and simple, allowing
> exceptional flexibility in composition.
>
> Comments inline.
>
> On August 7, 2018 at 09:27:01, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> There's interest in being able to run Metron parsers in NiFi, rather than
> inside Storm. I dug into this a bit, and have some thoughts on how we could
>
> go about this. I'd love feedback on this, along with anything we'd
> consider must haves as well as future enhancements.
>
> 1. Separate metron-parsers into metron-parsers-common and metron-storm
> and create metron-parsers-nifi. For this code to be reusable across
> platforms (NiFi, Storm, and anything else in the future), we'll need to
> decouple our parsers and Storm.
>
> +1.  The “parsing code” should be a library that implements an interface (
> another library ).
>
> The Processors and the Storm things can share them.
>
>
> - There's also some nice fringe benefits around refactoring our code
> to be substantially more clear and 

Re: [DISCUSS] Metron Parsers in Nifi

[Otto Fowler]

I think this is a good idea.  As I mentioned in the other thread I’ve been
doing a lot of work on Nifi recently.
I think the important thing is that what is done should be done the NiFi
way, not bolting the Metron composition
onto Nifi.  Think of it like the Tao of Unix, the parsers and components
should be single purpose and simple, allowing
exceptional flexibility in composition.

Comments inline.

On August 7, 2018 at 09:27:01, Justin Leet (justinjl...@gmail.com) wrote:

Hi all,

There's interest in being able to run Metron parsers in NiFi, rather than
inside Storm. I dug into this a bit, and have some thoughts on how we could
go about this. I'd love feedback on this, along with anything we'd
consider must haves as well as future enhancements.

1. Separate metron-parsers into metron-parsers-common and metron-storm
and create metron-parsers-nifi. For this code to be reusable across
platforms (NiFi, Storm, and anything else in the future), we'll need to
decouple our parsers and Storm.

+1.  The “parsing code” should be a library that implements an interface (
another library ).

The Processors and the Storm things can share them.


- There's also some nice fringe benefits around refactoring our code
to be substantially more clear and understandable; something
which came up
while allowing for parser aggregation.
2. Create a MetronProcessor that can run our parsers.
- I took a look at how RecordReader could be leveraged (e.g.
CSVRecordReader), but this is pretty tightly tied into schemas
and is meant
to be used by ControllerServices, which are then used by Processors.
There's friction involved there in terms of schemas, but also in terms of
access to ZK configs and things like parser chaining. We might
be able to
leverage it, but it seems like it'd be fairly shoehorned in
without getting
the schema and other benefits.

We won’t have to provide our ‘no schema processors’ ( grok, csv, json ).

All the remaining processors DO have schemas that we know about.  We can
just provide the avro schemas the same way we provide the ES schemas.

The “parsing” should not be conflated with the transform/stellar in NiFi.
We should make that separate. Running Stellar over Records would be the
best thing.



- This Processor would work similarly to Storm: bytes[] in -> JSON
out.
- There is a Processor
<
https://github.com/apache/nifi/blob/master/nifi-nar-bundles/nifi-standard-bundle/nifi-standard-processors/src/main/java/org/apache/nifi/processors/standard/JoltTransformJSON.java
>
that
handles loading other JARs that we can model a
MetronParserProcessor off of
that handles classpath/classloader issues (basically just sets up a
classloader specific to what's being loaded and swaps out the Thread's
loader when it calls to outside resources).

There should be no reason to load modules outside the NAR.  Why do you
expect to?  If each Metron Processor equiv of a Metron Storm Parser is just
parsing to json it shouldn’t need much.And we could package them in the
NAR.  I would suggest we have a Processor per Parser to allow for
specialization.  It should all be in the nar.

The Stellar Processor, if you would support the works would possibly need
this.


3. Create a MetronZkControllerService to supply our configs to our
processors.
- This is a pretty established NiFi pattern for being able to provide
access to other services needed by a Processor (e.g. databases or large
configurations files).
- The same controller service can be used by all Processors to manage
configs in a consistent manner.

I think controller services would make sense where needed, I’m just not
sure what you imagine them being needed for?

If the user has NiFi, and a Registry etc, are you saying you imagine them
using Metron + ZK to manage configurations?  Or to be using BOTH storm
processors and Nifi Processors?



At that point, we can just NAR our controller service and parser processor
up as needed, deploy them to NiFi, and let the user provide a config for
where their custom parsers can be provided (i.e. their parser jar). This
would be 3 nars (processor, controller-service, and controller-service-api
in order to bind the other two together).

Once deployed, our ability to use parsers should fit well into the standard
NiFi workflow:

1. Create a MetronZkControllerService.
2. Configure the service to point at zookeeper.
3. Create a MetronParser.
4. Configure it to use the controller service + parser jar location +
any other needed configs.
5. Use the outputs as needed downstream (either writing out to Kafka or
feeding into more MetronParsers, etc.)

Chaining parsers should ideally become a matter of chaining MetronParsers
(and making sure the enveloping configs carry through properly). For parser
aggregation, I'd just avoid it entirely until we know it's needed in NiFi.

Justin