NodeBrain / News: Recent posts

NodeBrain is a rule engine for element state and event monitoring. Each instance of the engine can operate as a node within a network of engines, and plug-in modules operate as nodes within an engine. Decisions are made by a hierarchy of cells that have formulas and values much like a spreadsheet. The 0.9.02 release provided performance improvements for large rules sets (e.g. 1 million) and the 0.9.03 release has an improved API for modules to extend rule engine capability with the addition of new cell functions and node functions. NodeBrain is provided as a component for use in the creation of monitoring systems, and integrates easily with scripting languages.

NodeBrain 0.7.4 (Dunce) is available for alpha testing with an updated NodeBrain Tutorial. This version breaks compatibility with earlier versions by folding the prior concepts of “brains”, “listeners”, and “experts” into a single “node” concept. Rules created under 0.6.x and earlier versions will not work under 0.7.x without modification. Updates to the manual pages, documents and the NodeBrain web site are expected within the next several weeks along with a beta 0.7.x release.

Support for a simple Servant Program Interface has been added to NodeBrain, enabling programs written in any programming language to run as a child of NodeBrain and communicate on stdin, stdout, and stderr. This simplifies the task of writing adapters that collect events or obtain the state of monitored elements.

NodeBrain is an agent for state and event monitoring that can be extended by servant scripts and programs written in your favorite language or plug-in skill modules written in C. It is intended for developers of monitoring application and is released as a component without rule sets or supporting add-ons needed for specific monitoring applications. A kit providing a small set of working applications is planned for release as a separate package in the future. ... read more

Patch release 0.5.4 is available for download. This release fixes a significant defect in the handling of server sockets relative to long running spawned child processes. If you are running NodeBrain as an agent (Unix daemon or Windows service), this update is recommended. A couple less important defects have been fixed in the handling of scheduled deletion of caching table rows, conditions responding to row expiration, and time conditions. Code has been included for a plugin module C API that is unfinished and undocumented, but sufficient to illustrate the future direction. (Our plugin module API will be the theme of release 0.6.) Documentation has been included for using NodeBrain over an SSH tunnel.

Patch release 0.5.2 for version 0.5 (Numskull) is now available for download. This release corrects some minor differences between the code and documentation. In addition, the source now includes a makefile and supports compilation on Max OS X (Darwin). A simple prototype C API was included as part of the minor restructuring needed to support the makefile.

NodeBrain is a rule-based state and event monitoring agent. Release 0.5.0 is a prototype contributed by The Boeing Company. It is intended as a seed for open source development of a more complete and reliable event correlation engine.

The NodeBrain program, nb, is an interpreter of the NodeBrain command language that includes commands for rule definition, state assertion and event alerting. It can be used for system health monitoring or other applications requiring automated response to state changes and patterns of events from application logs and other sources. ... read more