Hyrax Admin Interface

This is a place to start discussing peoples desires/needs for a Hyrax Administrators Interface (HAI).

Background

Members of the Hyrax users community are developing robust, highly available data services in operational settings, and have asked for an administrators interface that will allow them to monitor, control, reconfigure, and debug the Hyrax frontend and backend servers from a single console.

Additionally, to support external services integration with the Hyrax data catalog and service, Hyrax needs to provide an administration interface for service configuration and data catalog changes (e.g. adding new data sets to a catalog). Example of an external service integration with Hyrax is an organisation's digital library service for registering and maintaining access to data products. Once the user registers a new data set including data location and data access rights, the user may select an access service and protocol such as Hyrax OPeNDAP or WMS. This external service will connect to a Hyrax service using the Hyrax Administrators Interface to add a new data set to the catalog.

This page is the starting point for organizing the design work for the Hyrax Administrators Interface (HAI).

Definitions

Administrator

The administrator is the human that operates the HAI.

User

The user is a human that uses client software such as Kepler, Matlab OPeNDAP Ocean Toolbox, a web browser, and others to make requests (HTTP, SOAP, etc.) of the Hyrax server.

Operator Console

The 24x7 operator's console to monitor and control the data services as well as the user data requests, and receive service notifications.

Administrator Console

The system administrator's console to monitor, control, reconfigure, and debug the Hyrax frontend and backend servers, and receive service notifications.

Use Cases

The administrator uses the HAI to:

1. Hyrax OLFS and BES logging service
   1. Control (e.g. Start/stop) OLFS and BES logging
   2. View OLFS and BES logs
   3. Turn on/off OLFS debugging and view/save(/stream?) the output.
   4. Turn on/off BES debugging and view/save(/stream?) the output.
   5. Compare Server output with debugging associated with the request.
   6. View/set OLFS and BES's log settings
   7. View/set OLFS and BES's logging output levels
2. Hyrax OLFS and BES's data access service
   1. View list of OLFS and BES's services
   2. View service's data requests, request status, and statistics
   3. Control (e.g. Start/stop) OLFS and BES's data access services
   4. Notification of OLFS and BES service status
   5. Notification of OLFS and BES service status when thresholds are exceeded
   6. Notification of OLFS and BES heartbeat signal (e.g. traffic lights)
   7. View/set OLFS service configuration settings
   8. View/set BES service configuration setting
   9. Manage user and service access rights, quotas, thresholds, and priorities
   10. Modify service notification features and thresholds.
3. Hyrax data catalog service
   1. View data catalog and statistics
   2. Control data catalog service
   3. Send copy of data catalog and output level of attribute information
   4. View/set OLFS and BES data catalog service settings
   5. Manage data access rights
4. Hyrax user authentication and authorisation service
   1. View user service access history and data requests
   2. View/set user data authorisation, attributes, thresholds, and priority
   3. Control service access, user authentication and data authorisation

Design

Required features

1. Secure (SSL, grid certificates?) login and sessions.
2. Data request and transaction log viewing.
3. control and view debugging information.
4. control and view service settings.
5. control and view data catalog settings
6. control and view service statistics information
7. control and view service state information

Desired features

1. control and view user access management
2. control and view service notification features and thresholds

Period of use

The API features are to be permanent features in the Hyrax data service for use in building administrator and operator console applications to support an operational data service. The operational Hyrax data service is to support various service level access (SLA) requirements and provide timely, reliable data delivery with transaction logging.