perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Brian Tierney <>]

We are writing to inform everyone that in the next major release of
the perfSONAR Toolkit we will be making some exciting new changes to
the Measurement Archive (MA). This release is still many months away,
with a release candidate likely in the early summer and a final
release even further out after that. Some of the most frequently
requested features for the perfSONAR Toolkit we get are 1) an easier
to use programmatic interface to the data, in particular a REST-based
interface, and 2) improved performance for large datasets, such as
that returned by OWAMP. We are hoping to accomplish both these goals
with the new MA, but as part of these changes we will be moving away
from the existing SOAP interface for accessing the data.

Given this change, we would like to better understand the level of
support the community needs for the existing SOAP interface going
forward. In particular we would like to know if you have any custom
perfSONAR clients that rely on the SOAP data?

There are of course a few clients we control and plan to update so we
don't need to know about those. Specifically:
   - MaDDash and the perfSONAR Nagios checks will be updated to detect
and talk to both the old and new interface. This means that your
MaDDash dashboards should continue to work even if you have grids
where some sites have upgraded the new MA and others have not.
  - Likewise, the service graphs that ship with the Toolkit will be
upgraded to talk to the new interface. There will also likely be
enhancements to the graphs to take advantage of the performance
improvements and new data made available by the MA.

We are interested in other clients that the community may have written
to the SOAP interface. For those with such clients we'd like to work
with the developers to migrate to the new interface over the next few
months prior to release. We have started documentation here on the
interface:
   http://code.google.com/p/perfsonar-ps/wiki/MeasurementArchiveClientGuide
with additional resources found at the bottom of the document. We need
a better idea though of how many projects there are out there to
better understand the level of support needed for the migration.

Just to reiterate, these changes are still many months away from being
included in a final release of perfSONAR which is why we are trying to
make consumers of the data aware now. Transitions such as this can be
challenging, but we are hopeful that together we can make the process
as smooth as possible and the end result will enable the community to
do some new and interesting things with the data. Please let us know
if you have any clients as described above or if you have any further
questions.

Thank you,
The perfSONAR Toolkit Development Team