Introduction

Dashboard has two parts -

1. Live Data ( CPU, Memory, Disk) - Live updates are served via websockets at regular intervals
2. Static Data (Name, IP, OS etc) - This is fetched once.

Architecture

System information computation is expensive. It becomes really cumbersome when large number of users fetch on-demand.

To avoid this problem, websocket is used to send updates from server to each users once there is change in the server resources.

Only one worker thread does computations which in turn pushes dynamic results to the connected users.

Components

All components of the whole architecture are as follows

1. Users - HTML5 Browsers
2. Nginx Server - reverse proxy for Flask Server
3. Flask Server - Python webserver with webscoket capability
4. Worker Thread - part of Flask server, it updates users via websockets

Communication Protocol

HTTP and Websockets

Logging the events

Access and errors logs are handled at flask server.

• Log Rotation Policy
• File as well as console logs

Please see logging.conf and app.log for more details.

Run

Pre-requisite

Vagrant, Browser (HTML5), Terminal

How to run

1. Download or Git clone Project from https://github.com/pujansrt/dashboard

   git clone https://github.com/pujansrt/dashboard.git
   

2. Inside the project (cd dashboard), issue the following command

   vagrant up
   

   while it may take several minutes to prepare, you may grab a cup of coffee or tea

3. Launch Browser http://localhost:8000 it should launch dashboard as shown earlier.

Outcome

Acquired knowledge in the following topics

• Puppet DSL
• Automation of applications
• Vagrant
• Flask SocketIO

References

1. https://www.vagrantup.com
2. https://www.puppet.com
3. http://flask.pocoo.org