openNetVM Web Console for Statistics

About

Resources to view openNetVM Manager statistics through a web console.

The start web console script will run cors_server.py (which is an extension of Python's SimpleHTTPServer which enables CORS) on port 8080 by default, or on a port of your specification using the -p flag. See more details for this in the Usage section below.

Usage

Start the openNetVM Manager following steps in either the install doc or the example usage guide and be sure to use the -s flag supplying the argument web. If the -s flag is supplied, the web console will automatically be launched for you using the port number you have specified on the manager (using the manager's -p flag). If no port is specified, it will run on port 8080.

The following example runs openNetVM with four cores, a portmask of 1 to use 1 NIC port, and sets the stats output to the web console.

cd onvm
./go.sh 0,1,2,3 1 -s web

The following example runs openNetVM with four cores, a portmask of 1 to use 1 NIC port, and sets the stats output to the web console. It also runs the web dashboard on port 9000.

cd onvm
./go.sh 0,1,2,3 1 -s web -p 9000

Doing that will launch openNetVM and use the console to display log messages. It will print out a message stating that the web stats console has been setup and information to access it. You could use the browser to monitor the stats of openNetVM manager.

If something were to go wrong in the launching of the web stats, you could manually start it by doing the following:

cd onvm_web
./start_web_console.sh

You could also specify a port argument using the -p flag:

cd onvm_web
./start_web_console.sh -p 9000

Design and Implementation

Within OpenNetVM's main.c file, the master thread initializes the system, starts other threads, then runs the stats in an infinite loop until the user kills or interrupts the process. The stats thread sleeps for a set amount of time, then updates the statistics. When run in web mode, it does this by outputting stats about ports and NFs into onvm_json_stats.json and outputting an event list into onvm_json_events.json, truncating the existing version of the file and overwriting with each iteration of the loop.

The events system is new and currently events are created for port initialization and NF starting, ready, and stopping. In the future, this should be used for more complex events such as service chain based events, and for core mappings once shared CPU is completed.

The existing code for the web frontend (which primarily used jquery) has been rewritten and expanded upon in React, using Flow for type checking rather than a full TypeScript implementation. This allows us to maintain application state across pages and to restore graphs to the fully updated state when returning to a graph from a different page. The AppWrapper.react.js makes periodic web requests and updates global state.

Global state is managed via a small publisher/subscriber library located in pubsub.js. This was chosen over Redux as our use case does not require the full overhead of Redux. Our publisher/subscriber library allows React components to easily subscribe to new NF data or new event data upon component mount, and unsubscribe upon component unmount. The NFGraph components enable restoration of previously encountered data onto the graph upon component remount. To maintain performance, pubsub.js only retains the last 40 data points per NF and Port.

Please note: If you restart the manager then you will need to refresh the web page to reset the application state.

Build Installs

A bug had been reported that net-tools does not come with base minimal install of Ubuntu 18.04, which could cause a run-time error. The following install command should solve that if you do not have net-tools installed.

sudo apt-get install net-tools

The ReactJS app is ready for execution, but follow this process if you need to edit onvm_web/react-app Assuming you're using an ubuntu system Remember to run commands in sudo for nodejs and npm

Install latest stable Node.js version

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_13.x | sudo -E bash -
# Install Node.js from the Debian-based distributions repository
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
# Use package manager
sudo npm cache clean -f
sudo npm install -g n
# Install the current stable version of node
sudo n stable

npm should come automatically with Node.js, but on the rare occasion you do not have npm, you need to install it yourself.

sudo apt-get install npm

Install yarn with npm

sudo npm install -g yarn

Install programs to minify web files

sudo npm install uglify-js -g
sudo npm install uglifycss -g