Open-source multi-tenant monitoring system, Monasca
Roland Hochmuth
Monasca is a open-source Monitoring-as-a-Service project that has it's root in OpenStack. You can think of it as offering features similar to AWS CloudWatch or DataDog. It is a push-based metrics system that supports authentication and multi-tenancy.
Prometheus would be another example of an application that provides similar capabilities. Although, Prometheus is focused on more on providing an operators tool only and doesn't support multi-tenancy. Monasca provides the ability to store and query metrics, evaluate functions on metrics, such as average, calculate thresholds, create alarms and send notifications. It also supports Grafana, the time-series dashboard. It is scalable, performant and very extensible via micro-services that consume and publish to Apache Kafka.
In terms of IoT, my thoughts are that there are a lot of devices, such as sensors, that are associated with an account or tenant. For example, a household or business might want to monitor their home or building, but they normally wouldn't want to share that information with others households/businesses. Monasca could be used for doing this.
I started to work on a mqtt subscriber to handle metrics sent from clients and publishing/sending them to Monasca. It seems relatively straight-forward, although there are details to work out, such as authentication and what the exact schema is. What Monasca would allow, assuming it is deployed in the cloud somewhere, is for a bunch of IOT devices running in separate households or businesses, to send data. The user would then be able to login to Monasca/Grafana, using the same account that the IoT data is being stored in, visualize time-series graphs, as well as create alarms/alerts and notifications. Other web portals can be "easily" developed on top of the Monasca API.
Monasca is completely open-source. There are several large companies involved in it's development within the OpenStack community, such as HPE, Cisco, Fujitsu, Charter Communications, SAP and others and Monasca is deployed in production environments.
If anyone has any thoughts on the applicability of Monasca in the IoT space as well as potential development of a mqtt broker for Monasca I would very much appreciate the feedback. For example, if someone said I don't see how this would be applicable, then I would very much like to get that feedback. On the other hand, if this seems like an interesting project with some potential to mqtt/IoT as I've described, that feedback would also be appreciated. I would also be happy discussing the project in detail if anyone is interested in learning more.
Regards --Roland
