EMS - Enterprise Monitoring System

Java Web Application - SCADA / HMI server

Overview

In systems engineering, a system monitor (SM) is a process within a distributed system for collecting and storing state data. Network monitoring or more simply monitoring is the use of a system that constantly monitors a computer or a device for slow or failing components and that notifies the administrator. The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the interconnection of uniquely identifiable embedded computing-like devices within the existing Internet infrastructure.

Project scope

Project scope is creating an application that can monitor remote devices with different protocols. Following protocols are currently integrated:

• The Simple Network Management Protocol SNMP
• The Java Management Extensions JMX
• The MQ Telemetry Transport Protocol MQTT
• The ModBUS Protocol MODBUS is on planning

Application offers easly customizable dashboard, a pluggable and extensible data model, advanced configuration functionalities.

Dashboard

Application home page is a dashboard, each user can customize its widgets position and layout.

Dashboard is a drill-down, straight-forward access point to remote device information, in order to allow operator reach the most important information in the fastest way.

Data model

Application data model is pluggable and extensible each device is easly described by the notion of driver. The driver is, somehow, the hardware description of remote device. In the driver it is described the feature list of the device that has to be monitored.

For example let's suppose we want to define a RF modulator we can prepare a JSON file that will be our new driver like this:

{
    "type":"object",
    "title":"Modulator",
    "javaInterfaces" : ["ems.driver.domain.Driver"],
    "javaType": "ems.driver.domain.modulator.ModulatorDriver",
    "properties":{
        "status":{
            "$ref": "status.json"
        },
        "type" : {
            "$ref": "driver_type.json"
        },
        "power":{
            "title":"Power",
            "type":"number"
        },
        "reflectedPower":{
            "title":"Reflected power",
            "type":"number"
        },
        "nominalPower":{
            "title":"Nominal power",
            "type":"integer"
        },
        "location":{
            "$ref": "location.json"
        },
        "alarm":{
            "title":"Alarm",
            "type":"boolean"
        }
    },
    "additionalProperties": false
}

The driver must be compliant to JSON Schema and Hyper-Schema specification. For futher information please referer to EMS Extension project.

Once the driver is defined and imported into the application the user will be allowed to add information for each feature defined into the driver as in following screenshot.

Please note that each property defined in the driver specification can be "scripted" using Javascript. Infact once the property value is retrieved from the remote device a javascript code is executed in order to accomplish some custom operations. To explain better please follow this exmaple. Suppose, again, that the user purpose is monitoring a RF Modulator, he can "normalize" the power value using following code the converts the value in percentage value:

var obj = new Object();
obj.isError = function(value) {
    return value < 18;
}
obj.isWarn = function(value) {
    return value >= 18 && value < 19;
}
obj.convert = function(value, driver) {
    return (value / driver.nominalValue) * 100.0;
}

IMPORTANT: Javascript code is syntactically checked.

The same solution is adopted for protocol configuration.

{
    "type":"object",
    "title":"SNMP Protocol",
    "javaInterfaces" : ["ems.protocol.domain.Protocol"],
    "javaType": "ems.protocol.domain.snmp.SnmpProtocol",
    "properties":{
        "protocolType":{
            "title":"ProtocolType",
            "javaType": "ems.protocol.domain.ProtocolType",
            "type":"string",
            "enum":[ "snmp", "jmx", "modbus", "mqtt", "demo" ],
            "default": "snmp"
        },
        "version":{
            "title":"Version",
            "type":"string",
            "enum":[ "version 1", "version 2", "version 2c" ]
        },
        "readCommunity":{
            "title":"Read Community",
            "type":"string"
        },
        "writeCommunity":{
            "title":"Write Community",
            "type":"string"
        }
    },
    "additionalProperties": false
}

And again the application UI adaptes to the specification

Configuration

EMS Application allows a simple and usefull configuration as for example the access list definition.

Technology

• Java
• Spring (Core, Security, Data)
• Restful Web Services
• Javascript & HTML5
• JSON & JSON Schema
• MongoDB

Status & Notes

Project is still in its early stages.

TODOs

• Implement widget like page on device detail page
• Implement MODBUS protocol
• Extract data from MongoDB using Hadoop technologies? Use BIG DATA technologies?

Demo

Planning... A free cloud service must be found (PaaS or IaaS)