This document discusses using real-time internet applications (RIAs) for network health monitoring. It addresses two main challenges: 1) that HTTP was not designed for real-time communication, which can be solved using Comet techniques, and 2) not wanting to translate all monitoring protocols into HTTP, which can be solved using TCPSocket communication through Comet. It provides an example of using these techniques to build a browser-based GUI for monitoring an email marketing platform with distributed, elastic resources running on EC2.

1. quot;Network Health Monitoring as an RIAquot;
Adrian Weisberg
October 22, 2008
AJAXWorld, San Jose, CA

2. Constant flow of real-time monitoring data
from a variety of sources:
Uptime, response time, memory, CPU,
application-specific…

3. How do we monitor that data from the
browser?

4. Challenge #1: HTTP isn't designed for real-
time communication.

5. HTTP was designed for request-response.

6. Solution: Comet.
Asynchronous Communication for the Web.

7. Low latency, low bandwidth, and low server
load compared to polling.

8. Used by Meebo, financial companies,
Google, Facebook…

9. Many protocols used for network monitoring:
SNMP, JMXMP, SMTP, POP3, HTTP,
NNTP, ICMP, FTP, SSH...

10. Challenge #2: You don't want to translate all
of these protocols into HTTP.

11. Solution: TCPSocket.
Socket Communication for the Web.

12. Socket proxy uses Comet as transport.

13. Protocol client is browser-side in JavaScript.

14. Connect any data source to a web
application using real-time socket
communication.

15. Case Study: Email Marketing Platform

16. Distributed Elastic Architecture
(EC2- based)
Different Node Types:
MTA (Mail transfer Agent)
Email Template Assembly
Stats Collection
Message Queues
Logging
Monitoring

17. Browser GUI lets you add, edit, monitor, and
control jobs.

18. Active and Passive Monitoring.
Up/down, resource use, job progress.

19. [Demo]