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 0.4.0, Release Date: 2014-09-01
31 ---------------------------------------
33 This release features support for metrics and transparent access to a
34 backend's time-series data. Some backward-incompatible changes were applied
35 to some query commands for more consistency.
37 * build system:
38 - Added checks for format strings and arguments.
39 - Changed configure option for collectd::unixsock to
40 --enable-collectd-unixsock.
41 * core:
42 - Added support for “metric” objects which may be assigned to a host.
43 - Introduced support for handling time-series data: added new data
44 structures describing time-series data and a new type of plugins called
45 “time-series fetchers” which are used to access time-series
46 information.
47 * store:
48 - Fixed a memory leak.
49 - Apply (very) simple optimizations to lookup expressions.
50 - Added support for metrics and their “data-stores” (describing how to
51 access the actual data referenced by a metric).
52 - Added support for querying time-series data through the newly
53 introduced “time-series fetcher” plugins.
54 * frontend:
55 - Fixed a bug that might have caused reading too much data from the
56 connection buffer in certain situations.
57 * query language:
58 - The ‘MATCHING’ clause is now optional in ‘LOOKUP’ queries.
59 - The ‘LIST’ and ‘FETCH’ commands support ‘FILTER’ clauses as well.
60 - ‘LIST’ / ‘FETCH’ were changed to ‘LIST hosts’ / ‘FETCH host’.
61 - Added the ‘TIMESERIES’ command to query arbitrary time-series which
62 fetches time-series data from a backend's data-store for a given period
63 of time.
64 - Added support for date/time values.
65 - Added support for single quotes in string values: two adjacent single
66 quotes may be used to specify a single quote.
67 * documentation:
68 - Documented the frontend protocol in frontend/proto.h.
69 - Documented changes to the query language and new / updated plugins.
70 - Documented all supported data types.
72 Backends:
73 * collectd::unixsock:
74 - The plugin now uses metrics in place of services.
75 - New config options ‘TimeseriesBackend’ and ‘TimeseriesBaseURL’ to
76 specify access to time-series, currently limited to ‘rrdtool’ and
77 ‘rrdcached’ access.
79 Plugins:
80 * timeseries::rrdtool:
81 - New plugin adding support to fetch time-series from local RRD files.
82 - Supports flushing of values in RRDCacheD.
84 Version 0.3.0, Release Date: 2014-08-01
85 ---------------------------------------
87 This release includes major enhancements and new features in the SysDB store
88 which is the core of the database. Most notably, complex expressions are now
89 supported when looking up information and filters may be used to preselect
90 the information to be returned. Some backward-incompatible changes were
91 introduced in the query language to avoid potentially confusing semantics.
93 * sysdb: Fixed non-interactive mode when using libedit.
94 * core:
95 - Fixed weird behavior when collector callbacks were registered without
96 any plugin context information (as it would, e.g., happen when using
97 LoadPlugin instead of LoadBackend in sysdbd).
98 * store:
99 - Introduced service attributes -- similar to host attributes but
100 assigned to a service object.
101 - Don't log “value too old” messages if an updated object uses the same
102 timestamp as the old object.
103 - Switched from linked-lists to AVL trees for storing all object types to
104 reduce lookup times from O(n) to O(log n).
105 - Added infrastructure for handling and evaluating arithmetic
106 expressions and filters (see also the changes to the query language
107 below).
108 - Export various fields describing base attributes of all stored object
109 types: last_update, age, interval, and backend. These fields may be
110 used when querying the store.
111 * frontend: Include new service attributes in JSON output.
112 * query language:
113 - Added support for ‘IS NULL’ attribute checks matching on non-existent
114 attributes.
115 - Changed ‘LOOKUP ... WHERE’ queries to ‘LOOKUP ... MATCHING’ to avoid
116 confusion with SQL semantics.
117 - Switched from ‘<obj>.name’ to ‘<obj>’ in MATCHING clauses, thus, no
118 longer shadowing attributes called “name”.
119 - Added support for arithmetic expressions in places that used simple
120 data values before. Arithmetic expressions support addition,
121 subtraction, multiplication, division, modulo, and concatenation
122 operations. The expressions may be based on constant values or
123 queryable fields of the stored objects (specified as ‘:last_update’,
124 ‘:age’, ‘:interval’, and ‘:backend’).
125 - Added ‘FILTER’ support to ‘LOOKUP’ queries. Filters are conditional
126 expressions which may optionally be used to limit the query and the
127 result to object (of any type) matching the filter condition.
128 - Added support to specify date and time values.
129 * utils:
130 - avltree: Added an AVL tree (self-balancing binary tree) implementation.
131 * documentation: Added documentation for the new query language features.
132 * testing: Run all unit tests through valgrind by default (if available).
134 Backends:
135 * collectd::unixsock:
136 - Added support for spaces in identifiers.
137 - Store plugin identifier (host, plugin, plugin_instance, type,
138 type_instance) as service attributes.
140 Version 0.2.0, Release Date: 2014-07-01
141 ---------------------------------------
143 This is another development snapshot of SysDB. The main focus of this
144 release is on stabilizing existing features and extending the query
145 infrastructure to support all attribute types and further operators.
147 * build system: Fixed linking of sysdbd to include *all* necessary object
148 files. This bug caused some plugins to be un-loadable.
149 * sysdbd: Fixed shutdown process in case of errors.
150 * sysdb: Fixed a bug causing some server replies to be ignored when exiting
151 from the client.
152 * core:
153 - Always log to the standard output stream if no user-provided logging
154 callbacks had been specified. Previously this was disabled after
155 enabling logging to clients in the frontend.
156 - Simplified plugin naming information and determine configuration
157 callback names automatically to ensure better consistency.
158 * store:
159 - Simplified internal data management.
160 - Store the list of backends along with each stored object which provide
161 the respective object.
162 * frontend:
163 - Simplified and improved the internal architecture matching / looking up
164 objects.
165 - Fixed parser to correctly reject invalid object types.
166 - Automatically create the base directory of a listening UNIX socket.
167 * query language: Added support for numeric constants and added operators
168 for less and greater than or equal attribute comparison.
169 * documentation: Added missing files to the distribution tarball.
171 Plugins:
172 * syslog: Don't log debug messages to syslog.
174 Version 0.1.0, Release Date: 2014-06-01
175 ---------------------------------------
177 This is the initial release of SysDB. It provides the following core
178 features:
180 * sysdb: A terminal-based, interactive client program. Supports
181 line-editing and history based on libreadline or libedit and uses an
182 asynchronous, event-driven architecture to handle user input and server
183 replies simultaneously.
184 * sysdbd: The database backend service configurable through a configuration
185 file. The daemon supports online reconfiguration.
186 * core: Flexible, multi-threaded core architecture providing a configurable
187 plugin infrastructure for querying external data-sources and extending
188 core functionality. The following plugin types are supported:
189 - data collection
190 - hostname canonicalization
191 - logging
192 * store: Central, in-memory object store managing host and service objects
193 and their attributes. Host names may be canonicalized through respective
194 plugins. Each object is automatically attributed with last update and
195 interval information using nano-seconds resolution. Attributes may have
196 various types (integer, decimal, string, date-time, binary).
197 * frontend: The frontend handling client connections uses a multi-threaded,
198 asynchronous, event-driven architecture capable of handling multiple
199 listen addresses.
200 * query language: The store may be queried using the ‘LIST’, ‘LOOKUP’, and
201 ‘FETCH’ commands returning JSON formatted objects.
202 * utils: A rich set of abstract data-types and utility functions for
203 internal use:
204 - generic channels for asynchronous, multi-threaded I/O
205 - DBI wrapper to ease common database access operations
206 - thread-aware error handling and reporting
207 - doubly linked-lists
208 - dynamic sized memory buffers supporting formatted strings and binary
209 data
210 - UNIX socket client implementation
211 * documentation: Full documentation for the tools, all plugins, and the
212 query language provided as manpages and HTML pages.
213 * testing: Unit and integration tests exist for most parts except plugins
214 covering 77% of all functions. Valgrind and Clang's address sanitzer are
215 used to detect memory leaks and programming errors.
217 The following plugins are shipped with this version of SysDB:
219 Backends:
220 * collectd::unixsock: Query collectd through its ‘unixsock’ interface
221 * mk-livestatus: Query arbitrary (monitoring) systems using the Check_MK
222 Livestatus interface.
223 * puppet::store-configs: Query Puppet through its “stored configuration”
224 database.
226 Plugins:
227 * cname::dns: Canonicalize hostnames by querying DNS information.
228 * syslog: Send log messages to the system log service.