Alan Robertson, ‘long-time geek and founder of Linux-HA project with interests in managing computers’, is taking systems management to a new depth with using very low overhead. With Continuous Stealth DiscoveryTM, Robertson is building a comprehensive monitoring of systems and services for networks of potentially unlimited size. At the core of the project, is the data collection and storage of complex network information such as web servers to switch information, and most particularly, their dependancies (relationships) i.e SAN switches which depend on one or more SAN arrays.
The most natural way to store this kind of graph data is in a graph database. The speed of this kind of a query in a graph database is only dependent on the size of the subgraph – not on the size of the entire graph for the enterprise. Moreover, with graph query languages like Cypher, you can write a query for this kind of closure that finds the entire subgraph in one trip to the database. This is why I’m leaning strongly towards using Neo4J in the Assimilation project. It is a graph database, that’s open source, has bindings for many languages including Python, and has a series of very active communities which surround it and contribute to it.Read the full article.
Keywords: Alan Robertson • Assimilation Monitoring Project • Graph Databases • Network Monitoring