perfSONAR User Q&A and Other Discussion

[Cong Wang <>]

Hi Mark, Dan,

Thank you very much for the insights. It’s great to have the REST APIs for 
perfSonar 4.0. Can we please do a workshop? That would be super helpful.

Best regards,
Cong

> On Aug 4, 2017, at 1:54 PM, Mark Feit 
> <>
>  wrote:
> 
> Cong Wang writes:
> 
>    We are trying to build a platform to collect perfSonar measurement data 
> from multiple sites in real time. Is there a way to programmatically 
> retrieve the data from the perfSonar web interface, e.g., through RESTful 
> API? We plan to collect throughput, latency and packet loss if it works.
> 
> To expand a bit on what Dan said:
> 
> All test activity in perfSONAR 4.0 is coordinated by pScheduler, which, as 
> Dan mentioned, has a REST API for creating measurement tasks and retrieving 
> the results.  It’s stable but not officially documented.  You’re the first 
> person outside the project to ask about it, which will probably light a 
> fire under me to get it done.  All data is JSON and is easy to deal with.  
> If you want to do ad hoc measurements, where your platform tells pScheduler 
> to do a measurement on demand, this is the way to go.  The same API can be 
> used to start repeating tasks, and by keeping the URL it returns, you can 
> find and retrieve the results.  If you (or anyone else) is interested, I 
> could do a brief, informal workshop to go over it and supply some snippets 
> of Python code that can help get you started.  
> 
> One of the other new features pScheduler brought with it is a system of 
> plugins that allows us to have multiple ways to dispose of measurement 
> results.  This would mean you don’t have to retrieve the results yourself; 
> pScheduler can be directed to send them directly to you and retry if it 
> fails.  4.0 shipped with plugins that can post results to an HTTP server, 
> RabbitMQ, the system log or Esmond, which should give you enough options 
> that developing something custom won’t be necessary.  Information on how to 
> use archivers with pScheduler can be found here:  
> https://github.com/perfsonar/pscheduler/wiki/Archivers.
> 
> The one limitation is that meshconfig can’t be used to configure 
> measurements that use any archiver other than Esmond.  This is a holdover 
> from earlier versions of perfSONAR, and we’re working on ways to expose 
> pScheduler’s additional features to meshconfig.  You can still use the API 
> to run your own tests in parallel, though.
> 
> --Mark
> 
>