Features/Matahari

Matahari

Summary

Matahari is a collection of APIs accessible over remote and local interfaces for system monitoring and management. Matahari APIs are served via a collection of agents. Matahari also includes a framework for adding new agents and APIs.

Matahari is a Red Hat community project.

Owner

• Name: Jaroslav Reznik, Andrew Beekhof and the Matahari team

• Email: jreznik@redhat.com, andrew@beekhof.net and matahari@lists.fedorahosted.org

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 16
• Last updated: 2011-07-26
• Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description

The initial set of implemented agents in the Fedora 16 timeframe is:

• Host - An agent for viewing and controlling hosts
  • View basic host information such as OS, hostname, CPU, RAM, load average, and more.
  • Host control (shutdown, reboot)
• Networking - An agent for viewing and controlling network devices
  • Get a list of available network interfaces and information about them, such as IP and MAC addresses
  • Start and stop network interfaces
• Services - An agent for viewing and controlling system services
  • List configured services
  • Start and stop services
  • Monitor the status of services
• More agents will come soon (Logging, Generic configuration agent, and more)

Matahari supports access to its APIs over two different transports, QMF and D-Bus. QMF provides remote access over a Qpid bus. D-Bus is used as a standard and well known local system bus.

The plan is to ship a stable and easily deployable version Matahari for Fedora users. The aim of this feature is to make Fedora the prominent consumer and showcase of Matahari, for both users/administrators and developers.

Upstream website: http://matahariproject.org/

Benefit to Fedora

• Provides easy deployment of Fedora to cloud and clustered environments
• Allows for local and remote management of Fedora systems
• Provides well defined interfaces to a Fedora system for administrators (scripiting, maintanance) and for 3rd party Matahari client developers
• Allows the upstream Matahari project to use Fedora as a development platform
• Provides the core for future system configuration tools (replacement of s-c-*)

Scope

The scope of Matahari is limited in that we are now mostly working on the bottom layer, which is the agents side as opposed to implementing applications that use these APIs.

How To Test

Install Matahari agent

# yum install matahari\*

Start Matahari broker

# systemctl start matahari-broker.service

Start Matahari agent

# systemctl start matahari-<agent>.service

Test D-Bus interface
For example get hostname from the Host agent

$ dbus-send --system --dest=org.matahariproject.Host --print-reply /org/matahariproject/Host org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get string:org.matahariproject.Host string:hostname

Result should contain your hostname

method return sender=:1.73 -> dest=:1.85 reply_serial=2
   variant       string "localhost.localdomain"

Test QMF interface

$ qmf-tool localhost:49000
qmf: list agents

QMF Agents:
   Id  Vendor               Product  Instance                              Epoch
==================================================================================
*  1   apache.org           qpidd    971e8d8b-38f8-45ad-9ccf-f82ea85e3ed7  4
   2   matahariproject.org  host     d0175049-b186-41a7-a10b-11589107c20a  4
   3   matahariproject.org  net      97e02c72-8ac4-4fd5-901b-77574af3d45c  2
   4   matahariproject.org  service  bbf07d98-be32-4046-bf7b-c1d162b0611d  2

To verify the agents actually work we'll do some interactions with one.

qmf: set default 2

Default Agent: matahariproject.org:host:d0175049-b186-41a7-a10b-11589107c20a

qmf: query Host org.matahariproject

Data Objects Returned: 1:
    Number  Data Address
    ==============================================
    1       26205118-e589-44ca-969d-d79b8ae40b2a
    qmf: show 1
Properties:
Name                Value
=====================================================
load                {'1': 0.1, '5': 0.22, '15': 0.23}
hostname            localhost.localdomain
...

You should see properties with correct values for your system.

How To Test Matahari can be found in the Matahari Test Plan. We are interested in a general community testing of currently available agents and core Matahari for both local (DBus) and remote sides (QMF). Just try to use Matahari for your needs and report possible issues or requests for enhancements.

User Experience

Users can access well defined interfaces for system configuration and management over D-bus and QMF to manage their systems locally and remotely using Matahari agents. Matahari also allows developers to create more agents to make the system more powerful and to develop system configuration tools on top of this core Matahari technology.

Dependencies

• Qpid with QMFv2 (Qpid Management Framework)
• D-bus
• Sigar library
• Optional matahari-broker requires Qpid broker daemon.

Contingency Plan

No packages in Fedora currently depend on Matahari, so we will continue with development efforts in Rawhide.

Documentation

• Getting Started with Matahari
• Developers Manual
• API documentation

Release Notes

Fedora 16 features Matahari, a collection of APIs accessible over remote and local interfaces for system monitoring and management. Matahari APIs are served via a collection of Agents. Matahari also includes a framework for adding new Agents and APIs.

The available agents are:

• Host - An agent for viewing and controlling hosts
• Networking - An agent for viewing and controlling network devices
• Services - An agent for viewing and controlling system services

… TBD …

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/Matahari