PV Monitor

PV Monitor is a tool that monitors the state of PVs, IOC applications, and IOC hosts, using approaches such as monitoring channel access network traffic.

How to start PV Monitor

Setup

• Two configuration files are needed to set up the system for your site's configuration. For this purpose, we have provided configuration file templates, named configTemplate.yml and configTemplate_gw.yml, check the PVMonitor_Configuration documentation for configuraton file details.

• A large portion of the PV Monitor data is storage in MariaDB database (check PV Monitor Architecture documentation for more). A MariaDB database needs to be set up before PV Monitor the first time.

• Some database information should be added to the configuration file but a file named password.py, which contains password of the database, should also be created.
  
  PASSWORD=""

• You need a number of servers are needed to run PV Monitor. These include the one on which the main PV Monitor application runs, and another one, which has access to all the EPICS network interfaces of interest:

  • a CAINFO server (for which the code is in the Tool_EpicsServer git repository).

  • a gateway server which we call GatewaySearcher with all EPICS network interfaces (subnets) that allow PV Monitor see all channel access traffic

• A file called gateway_search_worker.py also needs to be imported from the pv_monitor_utils repo to the PVMonitor_gateway directory. The gateway_search_worker.py file is stored outside PV Monitor repository, as this piece of considered potentially dangerous because it contains customized UDP package (CA_PROTO_SEARCH) which will be broadcast out by GatewaySearcher. This could cause disruption to the whole system if any errors are inadvertently introduced to the code.

Environment

PV monitor is preferably run using Python 3.9 or higher. There are a number package dependencies. The conda environment YAML, environment.yml is provide in the main directory.

Run PV Monitor Gateway server

1. Go to PVMonitor_gateway directory
2. Run <python3.9 or higher> gateway.py -m <prod/test> -c <PVM client server> --config <gateway config ``file> -l INFO

Run PV Monitor client server

1. Go to PVM client server
2. In the main directory, run <python3.9 or higher> combined.py -m <prod/test> -g <PVM gateway server> --config <client config file> -l INFO

Run EpicsServer

EpicsServer is not the same repo as PV Monitor and it is a separate repo, but here still is provided instructions on how to run EpicsServer

1. Go to PVM Gateway server
2. Run <python3> server.py