Distributed systems management and monitoring framework

Context

The Altice Labs has several products in the ​​OSS area (Operations support system as defined by https://www.tmforum.org).These products are complementary to each other and have integration points between them. Is our goal to evolve the functional architecture of the system, diluting the border between products with a greater focus on supported business processes. In addition it is intended to also increase the flexibility to adapt the system to concrete customer processes (telecom operators) at project time; reduce the complexity of the constituent parts of the system and facilitate technological evolution of the parties independently of the others.To answer the above questions, the technical architecture of the systems began to be modified in order to autonomize functions that were embedded in products, having a greater flexibility in the design of functional boundaries and getting simultaneously simpler parts. Although each of the parts is simpler, the whole system is more complex in the sense that it consists of a larger number of independent parts.Aspects that are already relevant in the current architecture become mandatory in this evolution: deploy automation; test automation; monitoring and auditing systems that gives a single view of system operation; centralized configuration view; support system for services discovery and registration.The deploy automation and testing aspects are already currently addressed using the following tools: ansible, cucumber, selenium and jenkins. In the area of ​​monitoring, auditing, configuration and service discovery, there is a niche approach in each of the products that does not facilitate a centralized view.

Project objectives

Develop a framework that supports:

• A centralized view of monitoring information from the several business services, middleware, and infrastructure.
• A centralized view of the logs and logs correlation from different services involved in the response to external systems.
• A centralized view of auditing information in order to answer questions like: what, who, when, where. It should also enable the understanding of services communication patterns.
• A configuration centralized view.
• A service discovery and registration service.

Despite the central vision that is intended, it is expected that the framework itself is a distributed system consisting of multiple services.
Preferably should try to use existing open source tools and avoid completed in house solutions.
The following aspects are relevant in the framework design:

• Cost of development.
• Integration costs with existing systems.
• Cost of operation.
• Scalability.
• Fault tolerance.
• Flexibility for future change.
• Ease of use and configuration.
• Resources usage: CPU, network, io, memory. Agents that have to run on managed systems must be the least intrusive possible.
• Do not compromise the future use a public cloud.

Key skills required

• Good research and analytic capabilities.
• Java and/or other programming languages knowledge.
• Distributed systems knowledge.
• Desirable knowledge about databases that supports schema less documents and text search.
• Desirable basic web technologies knowledge (HTTP, HTML, Javascript, CSS).
• Desirable JSON and YAML knowledge.

Altice Labs product lines

Telecom Operator Support Tools and Platforms

Want to participate in this project?

If you think you have the appropriate competences to work with us at this project, please contact us to genius@inova-ria.pt.