ActiveGate plugins and associated entities

[rick_boyd]

Hi!

Do ActiveGate plugins support entity associations, either declared in the plugin.json or in code? Can/should I file this to ideas?

Thanks,

Rick B

[Julius_Loman]

If I got your question right, then the answer is not. ActiveGate plugins must have specified the entity of CUSTOM_DEVICE. See in the docs here.

With ActiveGate plugins, you create new entities of CUSTOM DEVICE type.
With OneAgent plugins you cannot create entities, you just send data to entities discovered by the underlying OneAgent (in fact just process and host metrics).

[rick_boyd]

Thanks Julius,

Question was more or less inspired by two things:

one being the behavior of the Elasticsearch activegate plugin, which correlates grid-level stats with the external call service to those hosts from the elastic rest client in monitored services (obviously some specific correlation is happening under the hood) and the second being the similar, but only visual behavior of my custom device's group details page, where a "service" entry is available in the architecture diagram but is not populated:

Can you or anyone else say whether this type of correlation availability is planned for the plugin engine/API?

Thanks,

Rick B

[Julius_Loman]

I don't think there is any way to create services at the moment for Custom Device (or for any other entity) and I did not see this populated anywhere (so far)

[rick_boyd]

It's not so much that I want the plugin to create a service but rather my existing services get correlated by possibly feeding the plugin the entity ID of linked services. this could be hugely helpful for event correlation, for instance.

In our case we have multiple different monitored services which consume and process messages to compose a pipeline, and the plugin I wrote samples messages from either end of the pipeline to calculate what the end-to-end time was.

[Julius_Loman]

Well, I guess the only possible method to correlate now is the IP address. From within the plugin code you don't have access (and you won't) to the existing smartscape topology (only if you would pull the topology by yourself). And you don't have any option to use the entity ids (SERVICE-*, PROCESS_GROUP-*, HOST-*, etc..).
Maybe you should talk to @Jakub M. or @Michael L about the details you need to achieve.

[Jakub_Mierzewsk · Accepted solution]

Correlation between services and plugins custom devices is based on IP:PORT pair. In order to have this correlation pleas assign IP and PORT to custom device. At this moment we don't support multiple CDs with same IP.

[rick_boyd]

super interesting! thank you. in our case because kafka consumer services are Custom Services i don't think this is an option so the eventuality is we would either need to be able to plug (via config or something) the SERVICE- entity id into the instance or await kafka consumer as a service type to get the ip:port to correlate. Is my understanding correct?

Thank you so much for the existing correlation btw, it's awesome to have the elasticsearch plugin info correlated with the upstream PurePaths