Chronos

A developer tool that monitors the health and web traffic of servers, microservices, and containers.

NEW FEATURES FOR 4.0+ - Real-time Data and Docker Container Stats

• Improved user interface & experience
• Real-time data monitoring
• Decreased loading times
• Automated notifications(Slack, email)
• Easier to use configuration file
• Now works on Linux, Mac, and Windows
• Previous versions(less than 4.0) of Chronos are no longer supported

Core Features

• Docker container stats (e.g. ID, memory usage %, CPU usage %, running processes, etc.)
• Temperature, speed, latency, and memory tracking
• Process monitoring
• HTTP route tracing

Quick start

Install dependencies

npm install chronos-tracker

Create a chronos-config.js

// An example `chronos-config.js` file

const chronos = require('chronos-tracker');

chronos.use({
  microservice: 'payments',
  interval: 2000,
  dockerized: true,
  database: {
    type: 'MongoDB',
    URI: process.env.MONGO_URI,
  },
  notifications: [],
});

More information on configuring Chronos and setting up notifications below

Initialize chronos

const cmd = require('chronos-tracker');
require('./cmd-config'); // Bring in config file

cmd.propagate();
app.use('/', cmd.track());

Download Chronos to start monitoring your application data here

Docker - Containerized Applications

IMPORTANT: Give your containers the same names you use for arguments for microservice names. Read more about it under the INSTALLATION section below.

IMPORTANT: In order to have container stats saved to your database along with other health info, when starting up the containers, bind volumes to this path: /var/run/docker.sock

For example, you can type the following when starting up a container: docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock [your-image-tag]

If you're using docker-compose to start up multiple containers at once, you can add a volumes key for each of your services in the YAML file:

volumes:
  - "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"

*Note: This module leverages the features of systeminformation.

Configuration

The microservice property takes in a string. This should be the name of your server or microservice. For Docker containers, the name of the microservice should be the same as the name of the corresponding Docker container.

The interval property is optional and takes in an integer. This controls the Chronos monitoring frequency. If this is omitted, Chronos will defualt to recording server health every 2000 ms or 2 seconds.

The dockerized property is optional and should be specified as true if the server is running inside of a Docker container. Otherwise, this should be false. If omitted, Chronos will assume this server is not running in a container.

The database property is required and takes in the following:

• type which should be a string and only supports 'MongoDB' and 'PostgreSQL'.

• URI which should be a connection string the database you intend Chronos to write and record data regarding health, HTTP route tracing, and container infomation to. A .env is recommended.

• [6] isDockerized: Is this microservice running in a Docker container? Enter "yes" or "no". (Defaults to "no".)

  • IMPORTANT: When starting up the container, give it the same name that you used for the microservice, because the middleware finds the correct container ID of your container by matching the container name to the microservice name you input as 1st argument.
  • Don't forget to bind mount to Docker socket. See NEW FEATURE section above.

Notifications

The notifications property is optional and allows developers to be alerted when the server responds to requests with status codes >= 400. To set up notifications, set the value of the notifications property to an array of objects, each with a type and settings property.

Chronos only supports Slack and email notifications.

Slack

Chronos uses the Slack API to send messages to a Slack channel and only requires the webhook url. Learn how to set up Slack webhooks for your team.

An example of configured slack settings:

// ...
notifications: [
  {
    type: 'email',
    settings: {
      slackurl: process.env.WEBHOOK
    }
  }
]
// ...

Email

Chronos provides the option to send emails. The properties that should be provided are the following

• emails - The recipient list (string) can be a single email address or multiple as comma seprated values.
• emailHost - The smtp host (string) of your email server
• emailPort - The email port (integer) is either 465 or 587 depending on the sender email security settings. Learn more about email ports at the nodemailer docs
• user - The email address (string) of the sender
• password - The password (string) of the sender email

NOTE: Email notification settings may require alternative security settings to work

An example of configured email settings:

// ...
notifications: [
  {
    type: 'email',
    settings: {
      emails: 'foobar@email.com, bizbaz@email.edu',
      emailHost: 'smpt@gmail.com',
      emailPort: 465,
      user: process.env.SENDER_EMAIL,
      password: process.env.SENDER_PASSWORD
    }
  }
]
// ...

Microservice Test Suite

Additionally, the repo includes a test suite of microservices utilizing the Chronos node module so that their communication, health, and container data can be logged. You can then visualize the data with the Electron app.

The microservices include individual Dockerfiles in their respective directories. A docker-compose.yml is in the root directory in case you'd like to deploy all services together.

Refer to the README of that branch for more details.

Electron desktop application

After installing the node module in each microservice, download the Electron desktop application from the public Chronos repo.

Inside the downloaded directory, install all dependencies using the npm install command followed by the npm start command to start the Electron desktop application.

Contributing

Development of Chronos is open source on GitHub through the tech accelerator umbrella OS Labs, and we are grateful to the community for contributing bugfixes and improvements. Read below to learn how you can take part in improving Chronos.

• Contributing

License

Chronos is MIT licensed.