Olive.Symptoms

It's a distributed enterprise Warning / KPI solution, enabling microservice-based applications to work as agents to produce non-compliance warning data, with a central repository to receive, process and communicate those warnings.

Why we need warnings

Every business has rules and guidelines which cannot be implemented as simple application data validation rules (i.e. hard validation). But they can be implemented as soft validations / warnings. Common reasons include:

• The rule is very complex with possible forgivable exceptions, while a hard-validation would be obstructive.
• The rule is experimental and needs time to mature
• The rule works on the combination of several data points that can come in any order.
• ...

How does it work?

It consists of two main components:

• A central component that collects, processes, measures and communicates the warning information.
• Microservice agent components, that send sympton data to the central component.

Each symptom item will have a UniqueID, Warning, Receipient and optionally a FixUrl.

Central Warnings Microservice

Host Central as a microservice. Inside appSettings.json, register all current agents.

   "Olive.Symptoms": {
       "Agents": [
         { "My Site 1": "https://mysite1.com/api/discover-symptoms" },
         { "My Site 2": "https://mysite2.com/api/discover-symptoms" },
         { "My webforms site": "https://mysite3.com/discover-symptoms.axd" }
         ...
       ]
   }

Installing Agents

In each microservice, add the following:

Step 1

Add the Olive.Symptoms nuget package.

Step 2

Add the following class to the Website project:

public class SymptomsSource : Olive.Symptoms.Source
{
     public override async Task Discover()
     {                     
         foreach (var something in await SomeThings...())
         {
             if (Formula(something))
                 Add(new Symptom(something, "{WarningKey}") { Warning=..., Responsible=..., FixUrl=..., Workspace=... }
                                .Responsible(...)
                                .Escalate(2.Days(), ...)
                                .Escalate(3.Days(), ...));
                 
             // Note: The unique key of the Symptom will be {WarningKey}:{somethis.ID}.
             // This is used to identify if this is the same warning, and used to calculate the time taken for the warning to be actioned.
             
             // Note: Escalate() and Responsible methods accept different formats:
             //         .Escalate(2.Days(), personId) ---> specific person
             //         .Escalate(2.Days(), "PersonRole") ---> any person with the specified role. If multiple people have that role, and a workspace Id is specified, then the person assigned to the project will be picked.             
             // Note: Workspace (optional) is the ID of the project to which the warning relates.
         }        
     }
}

Step 3 (.NET Core Apps)

2. In StartUp.cs, add:

public override void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IHostingEnvironment env)
{
    base.Configure(app, env);
    ...
    app.UseSymptoms<SymptomsSource>();
    ...
}

Step 3 (.Net 4.6+ Apps)

For legacy ASP.NET applications, add the following code to Web.config:

<configuration>
   <system.webServer>
      <handlers>
         <add name="Olive Symptoms" verb="GET" path="discover-symptoms.axd" type="SymptomsSource" />
      </handlers>
   <system.webServer>
</configuration>