High performance web applications for secure system monitoring and control
Clyde C. W. Robson, C. C. Ohm, Pawel Plucinski, S. B. Silverstein · 2012
As experimental collaborations become larger and more international, there is a growing need for webbased tools that can allow collaborators to securely and reliably monitor and control their respective systems both on-site and remotely from their home institutes. Increased adoption of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets also opens new possibilities for system monitoring, including push technologies to send notifications about important events or error conditions. We present a system based on state-of-the-art clients implemented in HTML5. These thin clients have high performance capacities due to modern technologies like webworkers for multithreading and websockets, a protocol with extremely small overhead. The client is adaptable to different platforms and requires no installation whatsoever. The client can provide highly complex functionality and offers a large number of controls and information channels through a simple-to-use gui, while major computation is handled by middleware. Beyond basic controls such as disabling/masking problem nodes or restarting processes, our system is also capable of processing data volumes and presenting live graphs and histograms on the client. If necessary, users can be alerted with text messages (sms) for rapid reaction to special events or error conditions. In these messages a uri is included that brings up the client in a browser with the data and the controls necessary to begin dealing with the event. All transactions such as control signals are handled reliably through use of enterprise integration patterns. Security is based on industrial strength proven protocols including SSL. We share our experiences implementing and testing these new tools in realistic experimental environments, including projects in which our group is involved.