semaphore-django

Architecture

Semaphore consists of two parts:

"the UI": sign in, sign up, add hostnames to your account, and view your ping results.
"ping service": set on an interval, this service will access the hostname database and concurrently ping them. The results are stored in another database that the UI can access to display the results.

User interface

Set Up

Semaphore is built on Python 3.5.2
Web Server Framework: Django
Database: postgreSQL hosted on AWS RDS
The ping service currently runs as a multi-threaded script set on a 60 second interval. I recommend hosting this project on your cloud container of your choice, and execute the script, so that it can run continuously.

Running Semaphore locally

Run python app.py and navigate to http://localhost:5000 to access the main app UI.
Run python ping_service.py in a separate terminal window to fire up the service that pings the hostnames you add to monitor.

Understanding the Semaphore logic

There are a lot of moving parts in Semaphore's logic.

The first piece of importance is the UI app.py. The Semaphore interface allows users to add hostnames into the database (as well as delete hostnames), manage hostnames, and view reports on their hostname's ping latency.

The second piece is the script that both checks the database for new hostnames, and executes the hostname ping ping_service.py. At the beginning of every minute, the ping service first queries the hostname table to update its list of hostnames. It then uses Python's multi-thread to execute 4 hostname pings at a time. Results from the pings are stored in the pingsresult table.

Working with the database

Semaphore uses PostgreSQL hosted on AWS RDS, however Django's backend settings do not discriminate between a cloud or locally based database, so simply add your credentials to django.backends in settings.py

  DATABASES = {
      'default': {
          'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
          'NAME': '',
          'USER': '',
          'PASSWORD': '',
          'HOST': '',
          'PORT': '',
      }
  }

Instance

user_id
instance - hostname for cloud instance
instance_provider - Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure
provider_service - Specific service used on Cloud Platform (ex. EC2, or GCP App Engine)

Ping Results

user_id
instance
min_ping- minimum ping latency
max_ping - maximum ping latency
avg_ping - average ping latency
update_time - time that ping was executed

App Pages

localhost:5000/: default main page
/signup: user sign up page
/signin: user sign in page
/manage: manage your hostnames and view results

pchung39 / semaphore-django