Author: Jernej Kos

Hello all!

Thanks to this year’s GSoC, a lot of work has been done on nodewatcher v3 platform. It now has a better, modular monitoring agent that can run on OpenWrt-supported devices, with a new JSON-based output format that can be easily reused by other projects as well. The platform has been ported to the latest stable version of Django (1.6) together with all migrations and dependencies. Development environment setup now uses Docker and fig in order to make it very easy to dive into the code without having to battle with various dependencies.

The API for access to node configuration and monitoring data (registry API) has been much improved, with better, more usable querying capabilities and performance. During development we have discovered a bug with cascade deletions and  polymorphic models in Django. Node configuration editor based on the registry API now supports references between form models that have not yet been saved — this functionality enables configuration of bridge interfaces which are now also supported by the firmware generator. I have implemented type support in the datastream library for long-term monitoring data storage with a new type for storing graphs as datapoints. This enables nodewatcher v3 to use datastream to store how the network topology evolves over time.

All the code is available on GitHub in several repositories:

• https://github.com/wlanslovenija/nodewatcher (branch development)
• https://github.com/wlanslovenija/nodewatcher-agent
• https://github.com/wlanslovenija/datastream

Hello all!

A quick update on what is happening regarding my GSoC project with bringing nodewatcher v3 platform closer to reality. Version 2 of nodewatcher used its own simple key-value format and a bunch of shell scripts to provide monitoring data. In order to bring this into the modern era where JSON and ubus are available as compact libraries on OpenWrt by default, I have in the last few days created a new modular OpenWrt monitoring agent that can run on nodes and periodically obtain data from various sources (directly from procfs, from uci, from netifd via ubus, from nl80211 netlink API via OpenWrt’s libiwinfo, etc.).

The daemon is implemented in C and different data sources are implemented as loadable shared object modules, enabling simple extensibility. Nodewatcher agent then provides all of the collected data in two ways: a) it can directly output data to a JSON file that can be served via HTTP; and b) it also provides an ubus object called nodewatcher.agent that exposes a get_data method, so other applications can obtain the same structured data as an ubus blobmsg. The nodewatcher monitoring agent could perhaps also be reused by the proposed Freifunk Monitoring and Administration Panel.

The nodewatcher-agent repository is hosted on GitHub with a README file providing a quick description of the used format, the ubus API and the currently implemented modules:

https://github.com/wlanslovenija/nodewatcher-agent

I have also packaged the agent for OpenWrt so it can be installed together with its various data source modules via opkg. The packages are available in the nodewatcher firmware package repository:

https://github.com/wlanslovenija/firmware-packages-opkg/tree/master/util/nodewatcher-agent

The agent and its packages should be considered alpha and the schema is still subject to change.