REST Web Activity (RestConf collector) User Guide

TSDR Overview

The Time Series Data Repository (TSDR) project in OpenDaylight (ODL) is an extendible collector framework used to collect and store network metrics from SDN protocols, traditional network protocols as well as SDN controller and environment data. This data is stored in a common format using one of several datastores and is accessible by a REST interface, Grafana interface (beta) and by the ODL provided API.

SDN, Environment and Traditional Network Data Collected

  • OpenFlow
  • NetFlow
  • sFlow
  • REST
  • SNMP
  • SysLog
  • Controller Metrics

The Time Series Data Repository (TSDR) project in OpenDaylight (ODL) creates a framework for collecting, storing, querying, and maintaining time series data in the OpenDaylight infrastructure. TSDR provides the framework for plugging in various data collectors to collect OpenFlow, sFlow, NetFlow, SysLog and Controller metrics time series data in a common data model and generic TSDR data persistence API. The user can choose which data stores to be plugged into the TSDR Persistence framework. Three data stores are currently supported: HSQLDB (loaded by default), HBase and Cassandra.

With the capabilities of data collection, storage, query, aggregation and purging provided by TSDR, network administrators could leverage various data driven applications built on top of TSDR for security risk detection, performance analysis, operational configuration optimization, traffic engineering and network analytics with automated intelligence.

TSDR Model/Architecture

TSDR has the following major components:

  • Data Collection Service
    • OpenFlow Data Collector
    • RestConf Data Collector
    • NetFlow Data Collector
    • SNMP Data Collector
    • sFlow Data Collector
    • SysLog Data Collector
    • Controller Metrics Data Collector
  • Data Storage Service
    • HSQLDB Datastore (loaded by default)
    • HBase Datastore
    • Cassandra Datastore
  • Data Query Service
  • ElasticSearch Service
  • Grafana integration for time series data visualization
  • Data Aggregation Service
  • Data Purging Service

The Data Collection Service handles the collection of time series data into TSDR and hands it over to the Data Storage Service. The Data Storage Service stores the data into TSDR through the TSDR Persistence Layer. The TSDR Persistence Layer provides generic Service APIs allowing various data stores to be plugged in. The Data Aggregation Service aggregates time series fine-grained raw data into course-grained roll-up data to control the size of the data. The Data Purging Service periodically purges both fine-grained raw data and course-grained aggregated data according to user-defined schedules.

TSDR provides component-based services on a common data model. These services include the data collection service, data storage service and data query service. The TSDR data storage service supports HSQLDB (the default datastore), HBase and Cassandra datastores. Between these services and components, time series data is communicated using a common TSDR data model. This data model is designed around the abstraction of time series data commonalities. With these services, TSDR is able to collect the data from the data sources and store them into one of the TSDR data stores; HSQLDB, HBase and Cassandra datastores. Data can be retrieved with the Data Query service using the default OpenDaylight RestConf interface or its ODL API interface. TSDR also has integrated support for ElasticSearch capabilities. TSDR data can also be viewed directly with Grafana (beta) for time series visualization or various chart formats.

RestConf Collector

The RestConf Web Activity Collector records the meaningful REST requests made through the OpenDaylight RESTCONF interface.

How to test the RestConf Collector

  • Issue a restconf command that uses either POST,PUT or DELETE. For example, you could call the register-filter RPC of tsdr-syslog-collector.

  • Look up data in TSDR database from Karaf.

    tsdr:list restconf
    
  • You should see the request that you have sent, along with its information (URL, HTTP method, requesting IP address and request body)

  • Try to send a GET request, then check again, your request should not be registered, because the collector does not register GET requests by default.

  • Open the file: “etc/tsdr.restconf.collector.cfg”, and add GET to the list of METHODS_TO_LOG, so that it becomes:

    METHODS_TO_LOG=POST,PUT,DELETE,GET
    
    • Try again to issue your GET request, and check if it was recorded this time, it should be recorder.
    • Try manipulating the other properties (PATHS_TO_LOG (which URLs do we want to log from), REMOTE_ADDRESSES_TO_LOG (which requesting IP addresses do we want to log from) and CONTENT_TO_LOG (what should be in the request’s body in order to log it)), and see if the requests are getting logged.
    • Try providing invalid properties (unknown methods for the METHODS_TO_LOG parameter, or the same method repeated multiple times, and invalid regular expressions for the other parameters), then check karaf’s log using “log:display”. It should tell you that the value is invalid, and that it will use the default value instead.