Investigating Persistence Layers for Notifications

Sammanfattning: This work was carried out for Cisco at the Tail-f department. Cisco’s main focus is on network and telecommunication. The Tail-f department is the developer of a network service automatization product that allows customers to automate the process of adding, removing and manage their developed devices and services in their network. In the context of this network service, notifications will arise to notify operators when something has happened. The notifications are currently stored in a configurational database that is currently used for all the data in the network service. The customers have wished for more flexibility and functionality in terms of operating the notification data since they are limited in what queries they may perform in order to analyze their data. The purpose of this project is to find an alternative way of storing the notifications with better functionality and efficiency. A number of different databases were investigated with respect to the functionality and performance requirements of the system. A final storage system ElasticSearch was chosen. ElasticSearch provides flexible schema handling and complex queries which makes it a suitable choice that fulfills the customers’ needs. A generator and subscriber program were built in order to perform tests and insertion of notification data into ElasticSearch. The generator creates notifications manually and the subscriber receives them and performs some parsing and insertion into the storage. The queries and performance of ElasticSearch was measured. The query results show that the new system is able to perform much more complex queries than before such as range queries, filtering and full-text searches. The performance results show that the system is able to handle around 1000 notifications every other millisecond before the system will slow down. This is a sufficient number that satisfies the customers’ needs.