For those not familiar with RTGov, essentially it does Business Transaction Monitoring. This involves tracking the execution of a business transaction across a set of services/components, and where appropriate apply business policies to analyse and react to the activity - which can in some cases result in the business transaction being blocked. This enables an organisation to externalise such policies from the system being governed.

I wanted to start some discussions on how RTGov/’BTM could integrate into Management/RHQ.next in this and a few subsequent posts, starting with how events (whether initial activity events or derived data such as situations or response times) will be stored.

Currently RTGov uses Elasticsearch which enables Kibana to be used to visually analyse the information. The main strength of Elasticsearch is the power to query any information in a json document - although mappings can be defined to have more control over what is stored and how it is interpreted, by default it will deal with any data structure that is stored. Kibana then builds on this ability to enable the user to focus in on information based on entered queries or filters that are established by selecting appropriate elements in the dashboard.

So the challenge here is how to make a Cassandra based storage mechanism this flexible - and then what visualisation tool should be used to allow the user to analyse the information (possibly http://www.dashbuilder.org/ - although currently I don’t believe it can handle untyped information).