Know The State Of Your Cloud
Crashing Applications? Deaf? Flying Blind?
The Sequence Toolkit (STK) is a middleware product for applications running in the cloud.
Add STK to your applications and you'll gain :
- Improved fault detection from Intelligent Heartbeating (Smartbeat Technology)
- Web based Application Monitoring for improved cloud monitoring.
- Visibility in to Application State (Starting/Running/Stopped/Timed Out/Sending/<Application defined>...)
- Ability to react to application state changes
- Granular Application Monitoring through Services.
- Monitoring of Individual Applications/Services or Groups
STK simplifies implementing software/application services and eases application monitoring.
Service Monitoring for Python, Ruby, Java and C/C++ Applications
State Change Notification and Registration in Python and C/C++ Applications
For details on using STK for more than application monitoring, refer to the Advanced API documentation (C/C++)
Smartbeat Technology
Smartbeat Technology combines traditional heartbeating techniques with checkpoint and state distribution to provide
a richer knowledge about the system state.
Many application systems rely on heartbeating to detect liveness or death of other application instances, but this is rarely
enough information alone for applications to make smart decisions. This typically results in abstract heartbeat frameworks that
become dependent on deep application data and state which is difficult to access.
Smartbeat Technology addresses this problem by combining application state and checkpointing with heartbeats to simplify the
decision making process of the application.
Smartbeat Technology aggregates service state, checkpoint and heartbeat distribution reducing network noise. It is very common for
different developers in a large organization to reimplement their own heartbeating solutions, leading to larger and larger overheads
in both network and CPU processing.
Networks degrade performance when asked to handle more and more individual packets - smartbeat aggregation ensures you maximise your
network resources - resulting in a very scalable fault tolerant middleware product that you can trust your applications to.
See the Smartbeat API
What are Services?
'Services' are objects that applications define and create. Applications may create one or many services.
In the most simple case, an application creates one service in the name of the application and the application thus identifies itself as that service.
Larger applications may create many services to represent the many capabilities that it has, E.G. Data Collection, Data Reporting, Session Management etc.
Each 'Service' has a notion of state, Running or Stopped etc. and these may be application defined.
