Topicus Onderwijs Dashboard

This project is meant to be an implementation of the Panic Dashboard that was published by the Panic team in last March.

This is an internal project for Topicus Onderwijs and will ultimately run on a PC + LCD monitor near our coffee corner. The idea is to show the status of our production systems, build system, issues, release calendar and other interesting things that make our company tick.

The project consists of two parts: a HTML5/CSS3 client and a small light weight Java server that will aggregate the data for the client from our production systems.

Currently the dashboard has the following modules:

Project status
NS (Dutch railways train schedule)
MantisBT
Google Calendar
Hudson
Subversion
Twitter
Weather

The Topicus Onderwijs Dashboard only works in the latest webkit browsers. No effort has been done to make it work in Firefox, Opera or IE. Safari and Chromium work as advertised.

Dependencies

Most dependencies will be fetched by Maven from the Maven central repository or from the repositories listed in the POM. However, three dependencies are not available in a Maven repository: the MantisBT connector, the WiQuery version and WQPlot.

To use MantisBT 1.2, you need to rebuild the MantisBT connector 1.1.1.0 against a MantisBT 1.2 installation. Install the jar as org.mantisbt.mantisconnect:client-api:1.2.1.0 in your Maven repository.

Both WiQuery and WQPlot can be found on GitHub under papegaaij/wiquery and hielkehoeve/wiquery-jqplot respectively. Simply checkout these projects and install them into your Maven repository.

Configuration

The configuration for the dashboard is stored in

~/.dashboard/nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.config.Settings.json

This JSON file contains the list of projects, locations and organizations (and possibly other types of keys) and for each key (project, location,...) the settings for the enabled plugins.

{
  "keys" : [ {
    "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.keys.Project" : {
      "code" : "<identifier>",
      "name" : "<descriptive name>"
    }
  }, {
    "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.keys.Project" : {
      "code" : "dashboard",
      "name" : "Dashboard"
    }
  }, {
    "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.keys.Location" : {
      "code" : "amsterdam",
      "name" : "Amsterdam"
    }
  }, {
    "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.keys.Organization" : {
      "code" : "topicus",
      "name" : "Topicus"
    }
  } ],
  "projectSettings" : {
    "amsterdam" : {
      "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.ns.NSService" : {
        "station" : "Amsterdam"
      }
    },
    "topicus" : {
      "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.google.GoogleEventService" : {
        "username" : "<google-calendar username>",
        "calendarId" : "<identifier for the calendar>",
        "password" : "<password>"
      }
    },
    "dashboard" : {
      "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.google.GoogleEventService" : {
        "username" : "<google-calendar username>",
        "calendarId" : "<identifier for the calendar>",
        "password" : "<password>"
      },
      "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.hudson.HudsonService" : {
        "matchers" : { "<code>" : "<regex matching project name>" },
        "url" : "<hudson url>"
      },
      "nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.plots.PlotService" : {
        "timeToLive" : "86400"
      }
    }
  }
}

Available Modules

Project Status Integration

To show the status of a project we need data. This is in the form of number of current users, average request time, deployed version, etc. At Topicus we created special status pages to retrieve this type of information. Typically a status page shows the overall health of the application for a server.

Waiting for a proper JSON status resource, we just scrape our status pages using the FooRetriever classes. To show your project's health, you should create such a status page yourself for your own application and write a scraper for it. In the onConfigure method you can add the DataSource implementations your retriever provides. See the ParnassysStatusRetriever as a typical example.

Configuring a project for the status retrievers is simple. Provide a list of URLs to fetch, each with a unique code. This code should be exactly one character.

"<classname of your Retriever implementation" : {
  "urls" : {
		"<code-1>" : "<url-1>",
		"<code-2>" : "<url-2>",
  ...
  }
}

In order to see how our applications perform we show several plots generated by wiquery-jqplot. This data is retreived from several datasources. To prevent large amounts of data to be held in memory and eventually cause an OutOfMemoryError it is possible to set a timeToLive value which makes sure that data older than a certain amount of seconds is removed.

Configuring this value is easy, just add the PlotService to your project:

"nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.plots.PlotService" : {
  "timeToLive" : "86400"
}

Google Calendar Integration

To access Google calendar you need to provide a username, password and the calendar ID you want to retrieve events from. If you add #major in the body of the event, the event will be shown in the major events section.

Hudson Integration

The hudson configuration per project consists of two parameters:

"nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.hudson.HudsonService" : {
  "matchers" : { "<code>" : "<regex matching project name>" },
  "url" : "<hudson url>"
}

The project matchers is a list of regular expressions that match Hudson jobs for your project. As it is customary to have a seperate build for production branch, acceptance test branch and trunk, the Hudson plugin will aggregate build information across the matched jobs. To differentiate between these branches, provide different regulare expressions for all branches, each with a different code. The code should be exactly one character.

The Hudson url points to the root of your Hudson installation. The Hudson dashboard plugin will take it from there using the Hudson JSON API.

MantisBT Integration

MantisBT integration requires MantisConnect 1.2.1.0 which is unfortunately not available in a Maven repository. You can rebuild the connector yourself against a 1.2+ MantisBT installation.

Configuring the MantisBT integration:

"nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.mantis.MantisService" : {
  "url" : "<mantisbt connect URL",
  "username" : "<dashboard username>",
  "password" : "<dashboard password",
  "projects" : [<list of project ids],
  "filter" : <filter id>
}

The MantisBT connect URL is something like:

http://<serverurl>/mantisbt/api/soap/mantisconnect.php

The user needs developer permission for each project to see the issues.

Subversion Integration

The Subversion module shows the latest commits that were applied to the stream of monitored projects. Each project that wants its commits to be displayed in the commit log needs to be configured in the following way:

"nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.svn.SvnService" : {
  "url" : "<url to svn of your project",
  "username" : "<dashboard username>",
  "password" : "<dashboard password>"
},

The URL is the point at which place the commits are logged from. If you have a standard layout like:

/project
    /trunk
    /branches
    /tags

Setting the path to the root of the project will track all commits done to trunk, tags and branches. If you set the path to the trunk folder, only commits to trunk will be logged.

Twitter Integration

"nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.twitter.TwitterService" : {
  "application" : {
    "key" : "<application key>",
    "secret" : "<application secret>"
  },
  "topicus_dashboard" : {
    "key" : "<key for topicus_dashboard>",
    "secret" : "<secret for topicus_dashboard"
  },
  ... <more feeds>
}

Weather Integration

The weather module takes local weather from www.wetter.com. It needs to know the wetter.com city key to get the weather for. This key can be found on wetter.com by searching for the city of choice. The key will show up in the URL. For Deventer, the key is 'NL0OI0046'.

To compute the sunrise and sunset times, it also needs the latitude and longitude of the city. For the longitude, use positive values for eastward movement and negative values for westward movevent. Specify the coordinates in decimal notation. For Deventer, the coordinates are: latitude = 52.25 and longitude = 6.2.

You can use our API key and application name for the wetter.com integration. It is also possible to register your own account at wetter.com.

"nl.topicus.onderwijs.dashboard.modules.wettercom.WetterComService" : {
  "apiKey" : "a810d551e21496e8123b82752c4171d5",
  "applicationName" : "topicusdashboard",
  "cityKey" : "<wetter.com citykey>",
  "latitude" : <latitude>,     
  "longitude" : <longitude> 
}

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