[kea-dev] Statistics design proposal for 0.9.2

Marcin Siodelski marcin at isc.org
Wed Apr 15 11:46:58 UTC 2015



On 15.04.2015 10:43, Marcin Siodelski wrote:
>
>
> On 14.04.2015 15:18, Tomek Mrugalski wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> One of the features planned for 0.9.2 are statistics. Here is the
>> proposed design: http://kea.isc.org/wiki/StatsDesign.
>>
>> This design is not the most advanced or fully featured. It's a
>> compromise between what we could do and what actually can do in the
>> limited timeframe of 0.9.2 release.
>>
>> The basic concept is that the statistics are currently simple, but they
>> can evolve over future releases. Whatever evolution path we'll choose,
>> the API should remain stable, if possible.
>>
>> Please review and comment.
>>
>
> I would like to clarify the comment I have made at some point about the
> use of concurrency when gathering the statistical information. I didn't
> really mean that the statistics manager should run in a separate
> process. I was rather thinking that it should run in a separate thread.
> This thread could create a socket and listen on the fd belonging to this
> socket. This would allow for better responsiveness of the stats manager
> in the presence of many DHCP packets being received on possibly many
> interfaces. This would also allow to perform certain independent tasks
> like, reception of a command, unparsing JSON, creating and sending the
> response concurrently with the main thread which handles DHCP stream.
> There is a problem with the concurrent access to the StatsMgr such that
> certain values have to be locked for write when second thread is reading
> them. But, that is not something that can't be solved with the design of
> the StatsMgr.
>
> The stats manager's operation is going to be based on time intervals.
> For example: keep statistics collected for the last 5 minutes. The use
> of threads would probably make it much easier to use asio-based timers
> which are asynchronous, i.e. based on callbacks invoked when specific
> timers expire. You can't do it easily when you are hanging on the call
> to select() in the main thread.
>
> I take the point about the limited time for 0.9.2 but I am afraid we get
> too much hammered to the idea of the synchronous processing even when we
> could do better. I leave it up to you, but basically if I understand
> correctly what Shawn said at some point, the lack of concurrency with
> respect to statistics is the problem in isc-dhcp.
>
> I wonder how statistics is going to be configured. I understand that
> you're planning to add invocations to the StatsMgr in multiple places in
> the code where you're going to bump the counters. But, is it going to be
> possible to enable/disable specific counters so as they are not bumped
> if not needed? Or, it is assumed that the counter bumping operation is
> fast enough that such optimization would not bring a lot of benefit?
>  From the "Performance Optimization" section however it seems that it
> has been of your concern.
>
> I am iffy about the naming for statistics per subnet You say,
> "subnet[0].packets-received". But, what if I remove the subnet with
> index 0 from the configuration? The subnets will get renumbered and the
> statistics will now apply to wrong subnet. Wouldn't it be better to
> identify subnets using SubnetID which is supposed to be unique?
>
> On the related note. Does this also account for the statistics per
> interface?
>
> In the data extraction section we should keep in mind that the
> communication over the unix socket requires two sockets: one for the
> client and one for the server. So I guess, you'll need to extend the
> "control-socket" parameter to specify two names? I am also not so sure
> that choosing the string as a parameter for control-socket configuration
> is a right choice. If you want to use the same parameter for future
> sockets: TCP, UDP or whatever else, it may quickly occur that you need
> more parameters. If I am correct about the two names for socket files
> you already have three parameters that describe the socket communication.
>

Forgive me my ignorance. Indeed you can use one file for the two-way 
communication. But, still the point about making the configuration 
parameter a map rather than string is valid. :-)

> It would be useful if the design included some sample JSON requests and
> responses, including responses which report errors in statistics
> gathering. The organization of the JSON query and response should be a
> subject for review because it will be troublesome to modify it once
> people start implementing proprietary clients.
>
> I also wonder if this "protocol" shouldn't be the base for the remote
> management API, in which case we should take into account use cases for
> the management API here? Not that I want to start implementing
> management API right now, but just make sure that it will be compatible
> when we implement it.
>
> On the class diagram, I still think that it may be useful to make it
> generic and allow for some additional types apart from the ones you
> listed. In particular, string value. Suppose someone writes a hook and
> wants to store some textual information in it like last error found.
>
> Doesn't Observation require setValue modifiers?
>
> Marcin
>
>
>


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