perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

["Andrew Lake" <>]

Hi,

It sounds like you found most of your own answers :) Yes you can manually add tests to maddash.yaml and the mesh will preserve them. Also, adding mutiple mesh blocks to gui_agent_configuration.conf is the correct way to point at multiple meshes. For the short to medium term tests it all depends on personal preference as to whether you put them in a mesh config or do them by hand. Some advantages of doing a meshconfig might be that you can also point the testers at them and have them pick-up the tests. It will also be easier to remove them since you won’t have to pick through the maddash.yaml file and delete stuff. Generally I only add meshes by hand if I am trying to do something with MaDDash that the MeshConfig doesn’t support (e.g. using a check other than the standard bwctl and owamp one, setting up a really sparse test topology). That’s just a personal rule of thumb and you can add whatever you want in there. 

Also, https://github.com/esnet/esnet-perfsonar-mesh is an excellent example of mixing multiple meshconfigs and manually defined dashboards.We kept it public so people could see it as an example for cases like this, so glad you found it. Feel free to use the config examples or scripts from that repo to help, but they are certainly not required to do what you want. 

Hope that helps,

Andy

On Tue, Dec 8, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Christopher J. Tengi <> wrote:

I am looking to add some grids and/or dashboards to our MaDDash host. Right now, we have MaDDash running on our MA, with the display being generated by a mesh.json file. We would like to be able to do 2 things: add support for another mesh (or 2), and add some temporary grids for short-to-medium term tests that are not part of a mesh. These tests are defined “by hand” on individual perfSONAR nodes.

I am assuming that the latter would be considered manual configuration ( :-) ), and the http://software.es.net/maddash/mesh_config.html says that "all existing groups, grids, checks, dashboards and general properties that are defined outside the mesh will be preserved.” Section 2.3 of https://www.perfsonar.net/deploy/installation-and-configuration/maddash-howto/ implies that if there is an existing maddash.yaml before the script is run to process the mesh file, that the configuration in the original maddash.yaml will be preserved. If that is the case, can I just try editing the existing maddash.yaml file and have my changes preserved the next time the mesh.json changes and the cron job is run to update maddash.yaml?

For the latter case of creating multiple dashboards from multiple mesh.json files, it looks like I just need to add more “<mesh>” blocks to /opt/perfsonar_ps/mesh_config/etc/gui_agent_configuration.conf. Would it make sense to create a “fake” mesh for my short-to-medium term tests, specifying that there is no mesh agent on any of the end-points?

Hmmm… Continuing my Google searches while composing this message, I just found https://libraries.io/github/esnet/esnet-perfsonar-mesh, which says that manual configuration can be placed in maddash.yaml.template. Is there similar functionality outside of ESnet’s perfSONAR/MaDDash deployment?


Thanks,
/Chris