1 SysDB Release Notes
2 =====================
4 The release notes contain noteworthy changes in each System DataBase (SysDB)
5 release, with a summary of the most important changes at the top. A complete
6 and very detailed list of changes can be obtained from the Git logs for each
7 release.
9 Compatibility Note:
10 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
12 All pre 1.0 development snapshots are not considered stable yet. That is,
13 all interfaces, including the plugin API, the network protocol, or the query
14 language, may change in an incompatible way at any time. All changes are
15 documented here.
17 About SysDB:
18 ~~~~~~~~~~~~
19 “System DataBase” (SysDB) is a multi-backend system management and inventory
20 collection service. It stores system and inventory information about
21 hardware and software systems. This information is (continuously) collected
22 from various configurable backends (inventory services, monitoring services,
23 etc.) and stored in a graph-like hierarchy of generic objects. The store may
24 be queried through a generic interface independent of the active backends.
25 Object names are canonicalized before they are added to the store to ensure
26 a consistent view of your infrastructure.
28 <https://sysdb.io/>
30 Version 0.5.0, Release Date: 2014-10-06
31 ---------------------------------------
33 This release focuses on simplifications and more flexibility in the frontend
34 and the query language. Most of those changes are not backward-compatible
35 but easy client implementations.
37 * sysdb:
38 - Include priority when printing log messages.
39 - Fixed handling of empty queries.
40 * store:
41 - When serializing the entire store (LIST command), return an array of
42 host objects (rather than wrapping it into another object).
43 - Fixed JSON format of time-series data.
44 - Fixed error checks of invalid compare expressions and reject them.
45 - Fixed lookups by back-end name.
46 - Added support for comparing attributes with different types by
47 comparing their string values.
48 * frontend:
49 - Clarified details about asynchronous messages and authentication
50 options and made client implementation more robust.
51 - Introduced a new message type encoding the JSON serialized response of
52 a query and its data type.
53 - Include the priority in log messages.
54 - Include object types in FETCH, LIST, and LOOKUP messages.
55 - Added support for including services and metrics in LIST responses and
56 skip hosts without the respective children.
57 * query language:
58 - Added support for services and metrics to LIST command.
59 - Changed syntax for attribute lookup to 'attributes[<name>]'.
60 - Changed syntax for accessing queryable fields to '.<field>'.
61 * utils:
62 - strbuf: Improved memory management.
64 Version 0.4.0, Release Date: 2014-09-01
65 ---------------------------------------
67 This release features support for metrics and transparent access to a
68 backend's time-series data. Some backward-incompatible changes were applied
69 to some query commands for more consistency.
71 * build system:
72 - Added checks for format strings and arguments.
73 - Changed configure option for collectd::unixsock to
74 --enable-collectd-unixsock.
75 * core:
76 - Added support for “metric” objects which may be assigned to a host.
77 - Introduced support for handling time-series data: added new data
78 structures describing time-series data and a new type of plugins called
79 “time-series fetchers” which are used to access time-series
80 information.
81 * store:
82 - Fixed a memory leak.
83 - Apply (very) simple optimizations to lookup expressions.
84 - Added support for metrics and their “data-stores” (describing how to
85 access the actual data referenced by a metric).
86 - Added support for querying time-series data through the newly
87 introduced “time-series fetcher” plugins.
88 * frontend:
89 - Fixed a bug that might have caused reading too much data from the
90 connection buffer in certain situations.
91 * query language:
92 - The ‘MATCHING’ clause is now optional in ‘LOOKUP’ queries.
93 - The ‘LIST’ and ‘FETCH’ commands support ‘FILTER’ clauses as well.
94 - ‘LIST’ / ‘FETCH’ were changed to ‘LIST hosts’ / ‘FETCH host’.
95 - Added the ‘TIMESERIES’ command to query arbitrary time-series which
96 fetches time-series data from a backend's data-store for a given period
97 of time.
98 - Added support for date/time values.
99 - Added support for single quotes in string values: two adjacent single
100 quotes may be used to specify a single quote.
101 * documentation:
102 - Documented the frontend protocol in frontend/proto.h.
103 - Documented changes to the query language and new / updated plugins.
104 - Documented all supported data types.
106 Backends:
107 * collectd::unixsock:
108 - The plugin now uses metrics in place of services.
109 - New config options ‘TimeseriesBackend’ and ‘TimeseriesBaseURL’ to
110 specify access to time-series, currently limited to ‘rrdtool’ and
111 ‘rrdcached’ access.
113 Plugins:
114 * timeseries::rrdtool:
115 - New plugin adding support to fetch time-series from local RRD files.
116 - Supports flushing of values in RRDCacheD.
118 Version 0.3.0, Release Date: 2014-08-01
119 ---------------------------------------
121 This release includes major enhancements and new features in the SysDB store
122 which is the core of the database. Most notably, complex expressions are now
123 supported when looking up information and filters may be used to preselect
124 the information to be returned. Some backward-incompatible changes were
125 introduced in the query language to avoid potentially confusing semantics.
127 * sysdb: Fixed non-interactive mode when using libedit.
128 * core:
129 - Fixed weird behavior when collector callbacks were registered without
130 any plugin context information (as it would, e.g., happen when using
131 LoadPlugin instead of LoadBackend in sysdbd).
132 * store:
133 - Introduced service attributes -- similar to host attributes but
134 assigned to a service object.
135 - Don't log “value too old” messages if an updated object uses the same
136 timestamp as the old object.
137 - Switched from linked-lists to AVL trees for storing all object types to
138 reduce lookup times from O(n) to O(log n).
139 - Added infrastructure for handling and evaluating arithmetic
140 expressions and filters (see also the changes to the query language
141 below).
142 - Export various fields describing base attributes of all stored object
143 types: last_update, age, interval, and backend. These fields may be
144 used when querying the store.
145 * frontend: Include new service attributes in JSON output.
146 * query language:
147 - Added support for ‘IS NULL’ attribute checks matching on non-existent
148 attributes.
149 - Changed ‘LOOKUP ... WHERE’ queries to ‘LOOKUP ... MATCHING’ to avoid
150 confusion with SQL semantics.
151 - Switched from ‘<obj>.name’ to ‘<obj>’ in MATCHING clauses, thus, no
152 longer shadowing attributes called “name”.
153 - Added support for arithmetic expressions in places that used simple
154 data values before. Arithmetic expressions support addition,
155 subtraction, multiplication, division, modulo, and concatenation
156 operations. The expressions may be based on constant values or
157 queryable fields of the stored objects (specified as ‘:last_update’,
158 ‘:age’, ‘:interval’, and ‘:backend’).
159 - Added ‘FILTER’ support to ‘LOOKUP’ queries. Filters are conditional
160 expressions which may optionally be used to limit the query and the
161 result to object (of any type) matching the filter condition.
162 - Added support to specify date and time values.
163 * utils:
164 - avltree: Added an AVL tree (self-balancing binary tree) implementation.
165 * documentation: Added documentation for the new query language features.
166 * testing: Run all unit tests through valgrind by default (if available).
168 Backends:
169 * collectd::unixsock:
170 - Added support for spaces in identifiers.
171 - Store plugin identifier (host, plugin, plugin_instance, type,
172 type_instance) as service attributes.
174 Version 0.2.0, Release Date: 2014-07-02
175 ---------------------------------------
177 This is another development snapshot of SysDB. The main focus of this
178 release is on stabilizing existing features and extending the query
179 infrastructure to support all attribute types and further operators.
181 * build system: Fixed linking of sysdbd to include *all* necessary object
182 files. This bug caused some plugins to be un-loadable.
183 * sysdbd: Fixed shutdown process in case of errors.
184 * sysdb: Fixed a bug causing some server replies to be ignored when exiting
185 from the client.
186 * core:
187 - Always log to the standard output stream if no user-provided logging
188 callbacks had been specified. Previously this was disabled after
189 enabling logging to clients in the frontend.
190 - Simplified plugin naming information and determine configuration
191 callback names automatically to ensure better consistency.
192 * store:
193 - Simplified internal data management.
194 - Store the list of backends along with each stored object which provide
195 the respective object.
196 * frontend:
197 - Simplified and improved the internal architecture matching / looking up
198 objects.
199 - Fixed parser to correctly reject invalid object types.
200 - Automatically create the base directory of a listening UNIX socket.
201 * query language: Added support for numeric constants and added operators
202 for less and greater than or equal attribute comparison.
203 * documentation: Added missing files to the distribution tarball.
205 Plugins:
206 * syslog: Don't log debug messages to syslog.
208 Version 0.1.0, Release Date: 2014-06-01
209 ---------------------------------------
211 This is the initial release of SysDB. It provides the following core
212 features:
214 * sysdb: A terminal-based, interactive client program. Supports
215 line-editing and history based on libreadline or libedit and uses an
216 asynchronous, event-driven architecture to handle user input and server
217 replies simultaneously.
218 * sysdbd: The database backend service configurable through a configuration
219 file. The daemon supports online reconfiguration.
220 * core: Flexible, multi-threaded core architecture providing a configurable
221 plugin infrastructure for querying external data-sources and extending
222 core functionality. The following plugin types are supported:
223 - data collection
224 - hostname canonicalization
225 - logging
226 * store: Central, in-memory object store managing host and service objects
227 and their attributes. Host names may be canonicalized through respective
228 plugins. Each object is automatically attributed with last update and
229 interval information using nano-seconds resolution. Attributes may have
230 various types (integer, decimal, string, date-time, binary).
231 * frontend: The frontend handling client connections uses a multi-threaded,
232 asynchronous, event-driven architecture capable of handling multiple
233 listen addresses.
234 * query language: The store may be queried using the ‘LIST’, ‘LOOKUP’, and
235 ‘FETCH’ commands returning JSON formatted objects.
236 * utils: A rich set of abstract data-types and utility functions for
237 internal use:
238 - generic channels for asynchronous, multi-threaded I/O
239 - DBI wrapper to ease common database access operations
240 - thread-aware error handling and reporting
241 - doubly linked-lists
242 - dynamic sized memory buffers supporting formatted strings and binary
243 data
244 - UNIX socket client implementation
245 * documentation: Full documentation for the tools, all plugins, and the
246 query language provided as manpages and HTML pages.
247 * testing: Unit and integration tests exist for most parts except plugins
248 covering 77% of all functions. Valgrind and Clang's address sanitzer are
249 used to detect memory leaks and programming errors.
251 The following plugins are shipped with this version of SysDB:
253 Backends:
254 * collectd::unixsock: Query collectd through its ‘unixsock’ interface
255 * mk-livestatus: Query arbitrary (monitoring) systems using the Check_MK
256 Livestatus interface.
257 * puppet::store-configs: Query Puppet through its “stored configuration”
258 database.
260 Plugins:
261 * cname::dns: Canonicalize hostnames by querying DNS information.
262 * syslog: Send log messages to the system log service.