Introduction

Taba is a service for aggregating events from a distributed system in near real-time. It was built to handle high throughput and scale easily.

Check out an overview of Taba's architecture on the TellApart Eng Blog: http://tellapart.com/taba-low-latency-event-aggragation

Also, take a look at the Overview wiki page: http://github.com/tellapart/taba/wiki/Overview

Example

There are many use-cases for Taba. A common one is to track the aggregate execution frequency and duration of some operation. For example, the following code could be added around a database put operation:

start = time.time()

...[perform database put]...

elapsed = time.time() - start
taba_client.RecordValue('database_put_time', (elapsed * 1000,), "CounterGroup")

When those Events reach the Taba Server and are aggregated, they produce an output like:

database_put_time_1m   156   13926.0
database_put_time_10m   2500   253961.0
database_put_time_1d   295677   23803205.0
database_put_time_1h   15259   1695586.0
database_put_time_pct   448662   32358553.0   [(0.25, 44.9), (0.50, 56.1),
(0.75, 76.6), (0.90, 109.3), (0.95, 156.9), (0.99, 399.3)]

This means that, across all Clients producing this Event, over the last minute for example, 156 put operations occurred totaling 13926 ms. Over the history of the "database_put_time" Tab for example, the 50th percentile is 56.1 ms.

There are many other input data types and aggregation methods available. See the Types and Handlers documentation.

Installing Taba

Taba was designed to run on Python 2.6 (limited support has been added for Python 2.7, but it is not officially supported). Taba has the following dependencies:

• gevent (0.13.1)
• cjson (1.0.5)
• cython (0.13)

To run the Taba unit tests, the following are also required:

• unittest2
• mox

Finally, to build the dependencies, the following are needed:

• gcc
• make
• python-dev
• libevent-dev

To install the dependencies on Ubuntu (12.04), for example:

sudo apt-get install gcc
sudo apt-get install make
sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo apt-get install libevent-dev
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

sudo easy_install gevent
sudo easy_install python-cjson
sudo easy_install cython

sudo easy_install unittest2
sudo easy_install mox

To install Taba, simply download and extract the source repository. (Deployment tools are in the works for later releases). Execute run_tests.sh from the root to make sure everything is installed correctly.

Installing Redis

The Taba Server is designed to use Redis 2.4 as its datastore (a single process Taba server can run with an in-process memory mode, but this is not recommended for actual deployments.)

To install Redis 2.4:

# Download and extract Redis 2.4
wget http://redis.googlecode.com/files/redis-2.4.14.tar.gz
tar -zxvf redis-2.4.14.tar.gz
cd redis-2.4.14/

# Build
make

# Optionally run the tests
sudo apt-get install tcl8.5
make test

# Install
sudo make install

Deploying Taba

There are many ways to deploy Taba, depending on the use case. See examples/EXAMPLES for pointers on how to get started.

About

Taba is a project at TellApart led by Kevin Ballard to create a reliable, high performance platform for real-time monitoring. It is used to monitor over 10,000 Tabs, consuming nearly 15,000,000 Events per minute, and an average latency of under 30s.

Any questions or comments can be forwarded to taba@tellapart.com