Monitoring NiFi – Scripted Reporting Task

May 17, 2017 pvillard313 Comments

Note – This article is part of a series discussing subjects around NiFi monitoring.

In the new release of Apache NiFi (1.2.0), you can now develop Scripted Reporting Task thanks to NIFI-1458. It is the same approach as with the ExecuteScript processor for which you have tons of great examples here.

You might also want to read the following posts:

With the ScriptedReportingTask you can define your own implementation of the onTrigger() method and get access to:

ReportingContext context (which gives you access to various information such as events, provenance, bulletins, controller services, process groups, etc)
VirtualMachineMetrics vmMetrics (to access the metrics of the JVM)
ComponentLog log (if you want to log messages)

Let’s start with a very easy example: I want to log the number of threads inside my JVM every minute. Here is my code:

log.info("Thread count = " + vmMetrics.daemonThreadCount())

And I can check in my nifi-app.log file that I do have:

2017-05-12 17:43:27,639 INFO [Timer-Driven Process Thread-5] o.a.n.r.script.ScriptedReportingTask ScriptedReportingTask[id=fd1668eb-015b-1000-1974-5ef96e1f9a8b] Thread count = 29

OK… now I won’t go into the details of all the information you can access using the “context” variable but let’s try another example…

I want to send a POST request over HTTP containing a JSON representation of the summary of my root process group.

I’m not really used to Groovy so please excuse my coding style ;-). But here is a working code (available here as well):

def json = Class.forName("javax.json.Json")
def httpClients = Class.forName("org.apache.http.impl.client.HttpClients")
def contentType = Class.forName("org.apache.http.entity.ContentType")

def status = context.getEventAccess().getControllerStatus();
def factory = json.createBuilderFactory(Collections.emptyMap());
def builder = factory.createObjectBuilder();

builder.add("componentId", status.getId());
builder.add("bytesRead", status.getBytesRead());
builder.add("bytesWritten", status.getBytesWritten());
builder.add("bytesReceived", status.getBytesReceived());
builder.add("bytesSent", status.getBytesSent());
builder.add("bytesTransferred", status.getBytesTransferred());
builder.add("flowFilesReceived", status.getFlowFilesReceived());
builder.add("flowFilesSent", status.getFlowFilesSent());
builder.add("flowFilesTransferred", status.getFlowFilesTransferred());
builder.add("inputContentSize", status.getInputContentSize());
builder.add("inputCount", status.getInputCount());
builder.add("outputContentSize", status.getOutputContentSize());
builder.add("outputCount", status.getOutputCount());
builder.add("queuedContentSize", status.getQueuedContentSize());
builder.add("activeThreadCount", status.getActiveThreadCount());
builder.add("queuedCount", status.getQueuedCount());

def requestEntity = new org.apache.http.entity.StringEntity(builder.build().toString(), contentType.APPLICATION_JSON);
def httpclient = httpClients.createDefault();
def postMethod = new org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost("http://localhost:9999/rootStatus");
postMethod.setEntity(requestEntity);
httpclient.execute(postMethod);
httpclient.close();

Note – this should be improved to, for instance, properly handle potential exceptions.

To get this code working, I also have to specify the required dependencies (JSON, Apache HTTP, etc). For that, in the module directory property of the reporting task, I gave the following paths (because I’m lazy, I am pointing to much dependencies than required):

/var/lib/nifi/work/nar/extensions/nifi-standard-nar-1.2.0.nar-unpacked/META-INF/bundled-dependencies/
/var/lib/nifi/work/nar/extensions/nifi-site-to-site-reporting-nar-1.2.0.nar-unpacked/META-INF/bundled-dependencies/

In my example I’m sending my JSON payload with a POST HTTP request to localhost on port 9999 with the path rootStatus. To receive the request, I started a ListenHttp processor with the following configuration:

Once my reporting task is started, I start receiving the information as flow files:

This scripted reporting task allows you to quickly develop proof of concept to send information to your internal systems using the interfaces you want. However, according to your needs, it might be more interesting to develop your own reporting task in Java and to build the corresponding NAR. It will give you more flexibility/options (you’ll be able to implement more interfaces) and better performances.

As usual feel free to ask questions and comment this post.

Monitoring NiFi – Ambari & Grafana

May 16, 2017 pvillard3121 Comments

Note – This article is part of a series discussing subjects around NiFi monitoring.

When using Apache NiFi (note that version 1.2.0 is now released!) as part of HDF, a lot of of things are simplified using Apache Ambari to deploy NiFi and manage its configuration. Also, using Ambari Metrics service and Grafana, you have a way to easily and visually monitor NiFi performances. And you can also use Apache Ranger to centralize the authorizations management for multiple components (NiFi, Kafka, etc) in one single place.

This article will discuss how you can use Ambari Metrics and Grafana to improve your NiFi monitoring. Let’s start with a quick discussion around AMS (Ambari Metrics System). By default this service is running a Metrics Collector with an embedded HBase instance (and a Zookeeper instance) to store all the metrics, and Ambari will also deploy Metrics Monitor instances on all the nodes of the cluster. The monitors will collect the metrics at system level and send the metrics to the collector. However, the collector also exposes a REST API and that’s what NiFi is going to use with the AmbariReportingTask.

Source and documentation is on the Hortonworks website here.

When using HDF, the Ambari Reporting task should be already up and running for you. If not, you can add it and configure it with a frequency of one minute (it does matter) and use the following parameters:

Note that “ambari.metrics.collector.url” is an environment variable already set for you when Ambari is starting NiFi. You could also directly give the address, in my case:

http://pvillard-hdf-1:6188/ws/v1/timeline/metrics

Once this reporting task is up and running, you should be able to see the metrics on the NiFi service page in Ambari:

Also, you can go into Grafana to display dashboards with the metrics of your components. You have pre-configured dashboards and here is the one for NiFi:

Now, all the metrics we have here are at cluster level. We are not able to display metrics for specific workflows. With the latest release of Apache NiFi (1.2.0), there is now an optional parameter in the AmbariReportingTask to specify a process group ID. This way, by creating a second reporting task (keep the one providing cluster-level metrics) and by specifying the ID of a specific process group, you can actually create your Grafana dashboards at workflow level.

Let’s say I’ve the following workflow:

And inside my process group, I have:

Now, my process group having the ID “75973b6e-2d38-1cf3-ffff-fffffdea8cbc”, I can define the following Ambari reporting task:

Note – you must keep “nifi” as the Application ID as it has to match the configuration of the Ambari Metrics System.

Once your reporting task is running, in Grafana, you can create your own dashboard for this workflow and display the metrics you want:

For my Kafka example, here is the dashboard I defined:

In this example, I can see that my workflow is running fine but the free disk space on one of my node is decreasing very quickly. It turns out that when my disk is completely filled, back pressure will be enabled in my workflow and there is no more data sent to Kafka. Instead data is queued in NiFi.

This simple example gives me a lot of information:

Everything is default configuration in Ambari and I chose my three NiFi nodes to also host Kafka brokers. By default, for Kafka, the replication factor is set to 1, the number of partitions is set to 1 and the automatic creation of topic is allowed (that’s why I didn’t need to create the topic before starting my workflow). Because of the default parameters, all of the data is sent to only one Kafka broker (pvillard-hdf-2) and that’s why the disk space is quickly decreasing on this node since my three NiFi nodes are sending data to this broker.
Also, we clearly see that’s not a good idea to collocate NiFi and Kafka on the same nodes since they are both IO intensive. In this case, they are using the same disk… and we can see that the task duration (for NiFi) is clearly higher on the Kafka node that is receiving the data (pvillard-hdf-2). Long story short: keep NiFi and Kafka on separated nodes (or at the very least with different disks).

With HDF and the Ambari Metrics System, it gives you the ability to create custom relevant dashboards for specific use cases. It also allows you to mix information from Kafka, from NiFi and from the hosts to have all the needed information in one single place.

Also, by using the REST API of the Metrics Collector (you may be interested by this article), you could also send your own data (not only the data gathered at the process group level) to add more information into your dashboards. An example that comes in mind would be to send the lineage duration (see Monitoring of Workflow SLA) at the end of the workflow using an InvokeHTTP processor and sending a JSON payload using a POST request to the API endpoint.

Let’s say I want to monitor how long it takes between my GenerateFlowFile and the end of my workflow to check if some particular events are taking longer. Then I could have something like:

What am I doing here? I want to send to AMS the information about the lineage duration of the flow files I sent into my Kafka topic. However I don’t want to send the duration of every single event (that’s not really useful and it’s going to generate a lot of requests/data). Instead I want to make an API call only once per minute. The idea is to compute the mean and max of the lineage duration with a rolling window of one minute and to only send this value to AMS.

I could use the new AttributeRollingWindow processor but it is not as fast as the PublishKafka and I don’t want to generate back pressure in my relationships. So I use the InvokeScriptedProcessor to build my own rolling processor (it’s faster because I am not using any state information):

this processor takes a frequency duration as a parameter (that I’ll set to 1 minute in this example)
for every flow file coming in, it will extract the lineage start date to compute max and mean lineage duration over the rolling window. If the last flow file sent in the success relationship was less than one minute ago, I’ll route the flow file to drop relationship (that I set to auto-terminated). If it was more than one minute ago, I update the attributes of the current flow file with the mean and max of all the flow files since the last “success” flow file and route this flow file in the success relationship

Since I’ve flow files coming in my processor at a high rate, I know that my processor will release one flow file every minute with the mean and max of the linage duration for the flow files of the last minute.

Then I use a ReplaceText processor to construct the JSON payload that I’ll send to the Metrics Collector using the InvokeHttp processor.

Here is the configuration of the InvokeScriptedProcessor:

The Groovy script used can be found here.

Then I create the JSON payload with the ReplaceText processor:

Note that I use the ID of the processor as the “instanceid” attribute in the JSON.

Then, I use the InvokeHttp processor (with a scheduling/frequency of 1 minute):

Now, I can use this information to build the corresponding graph in my Grafana dashboard:

I can see that, in average, it takes about 150 milliseconds to generate my flow file, publish it in my Kafka topic and get it into my scripted processor. I could also generate one metric per host of my cluster to check if a node is performing badly compared to the others.

Now you can easily send your custom data into AMS and create dashboards for your specific use cases and workflows.

As usual feel free to ask questions and comment this post.

Monitoring NiFi – Workflow SLA

May 15, 2017May 15, 2017 pvillard313 Comments

Note – This article is part of a series discussing subjects around NiFi monitoring.

Depending of the workflows and use cases, you may want to retrieve some metrics per use-case/workflow instead of high level metrics. One of the things you could be looking after is Workflow SLA.

First of all, we need to agree on what is “Workflow SLA”. In this article, by SLA (Service-Level Agreement) monitoring I mean that I want to ensure that a workflow is processing every single event quickly enough. In other words, if an event took a long time to be processed, I want to be aware of that so I can understand what is going on. A workflow could be perfectly running in NiFi (no bulletin generated, no error) but the processing time could get bigger because of external causes (resources exhaustion, network bandwidth with external systems, abnormal event size, etc).

Luckily for us, every single flow file within NiFi contains two core attributes that are perfectly designed for our needs. From the documentation:

entryDate: The date and time at which the FlowFile entered the system (i.e., was created). The value of this attribute is a number that represents the number of milliseconds since midnight, Jan. 1, 1970 (UTC).

lineageStartDate: Any time that a FlowFile is cloned, merged, or split, this results in a “child” FlowFile being created. As those children are then cloned, merged, or split, a chain of ancestors is built. This value represents the date and time at which the oldest ancestor entered the system. Another way to think about this is that this attribute represents the latency of the FlowFile through the system. The value is a number that represents the number of milliseconds since midnight, Jan. 1, 1970 (UTC).

In our case we are really interested by the “lineageStartDate” attribute but based on your specific use cases and needs you could also be interested by “entryDate”.

At the end of my workflow I want to monitor, I could use a RouteOnAttribute processor to route the event if and only if the duration since the lineage start date is over a given threshold (let’s say one minute for the below example). And if an event took longer than expected, I’m routing the flow file to a PutEmail processor to send an email and receive a notification.

My RouteOnAttribute configuration:

This way, at a workflow level, you are able to check if the processing time of an event is meeting your requirements. You could obviously follow the same approach to check the processing time at multiple critical points of the workflow.

Note that, instead of sending an email notification, you could perfectly use any other kind of processor to integrate this alert/event with any system you are using on your side.

One last comment, I recommend you to check out the article about the Ambari Reporting Task and Grafana where I’m also discussing Workflow SLA and how to send the metrics to Ambari Metrics System and display the information into a Grafana dashboard.

As usual feel free to ask questions and comment this post.

Monitoring NiFi – Site2Site reporting tasks

May 13, 2017 pvillard3116 Comments

Note – This article is part of a series discussing subjects around NiFi monitoring.

If we look at the development documentation about reporting tasks:

So far, we have mentioned little about how to convey to the outside world how NiFi and its components are performing. Is the system able to keep up with the incoming data rate? How much more can the system handle? How much data is processed at the peak time of day versus the least busy time of day?

In order to answer these questions, and many more, NiFi provides a capability for reporting status, statistics, metrics, and monitoring information to external services by means of the ReportingTask interface. ReportingTasks are given access to a host of information to determine how the system is performing.

Out of the box, you have quite a lot of available reporting tasks and, in this article, we are going to focus on few of them (have a look at the other articles to find more about the other reporting tasks).

Before going into the details, I am going to discuss Site To Site related reporting tasks and we need to understand what is Site To Site (S2S):

When sending data from one instance of NiFi to another, there are many different protocols that can be used. The preferred protocol, though, is the NiFi Site-to-Site Protocol. Site-to-Site makes it easy to securely and efficiently transfer data to/from nodes in one NiFi instance or data producing application to nodes in another NiFi instance or other consuming application.

In this case, we are going to use S2S reporting tasks, it means that the reporting tasks are continually running to collect data and to send this data to a remote NiFi instance, but you can use S2S to send data to the instance running the reporting task as well. This way, by using an input port on the canvas, you can actually receive the data generated by the reporting task and use it in a NiFi workflow. That’s really powerful because, now, you can use all the NiFi capabilities to process this data and do whatever you want with it.

Let’s go over some examples!

Monitoring bulletins

With the new version of Apache NiFi (1.2.0), you can transform every bulletin into a flow file sent to any NiFi instance using Site-To-Site. This way, as soon as a processor / controller service / reporting task is generating a bulletin this can be converted into a flow file that you can use to feed any system you want.

Let’s configure this reporting task to send the bulletins (as flow files) to an input port called “bulletinMonitoring” and use the flow files to send emails.

First, since my NiFi cluster is secured, I create a StandardSSLContextService in the Controller Services tab of the Controller Settings menu (this way, it can be used by reporting tasks).

Then, I can define my reporting task by adding a new SiteToSiteBulletinReportingTask:

Before starting the task, on my canvas, I have the following:

Note – in a secured environment, you need to set the correct permissions on the components. You need to allow NiFi nodes to receive data via site-to-site on the input port and you also need to grant the correct permissions on the root process group so the nodes are able to see the component, view and modify the data.

I configured my PutEmail processor to send emails using the Gmail SMTP server:

Now, as soon as bulletins are generated I’ll receive a notification by email containing my message with the attributes of the flow file, and there will the bulletins as attachment of my email.

Obviously, instead of sending emails, you could, for example, use some other processors to automatically open tickets in your ticketing system (like JIRA using REST API).

Monitoring disk space

Now, using the task we previously set, we can take advantage of the task monitoring disk space. This reporting task will generate warn logs (in the NiFi log file) and bulletins when the disk partition to monitor is used over a custom threshold. In case I want to monitor the Content Repository, I could configure my reporting task as below:

Using the combination of this Reporting Task and the SiteToSiteBulletinReportingTask, I’m able to generate flow files when the disk utilization is reaching a critical point and to receive notifications using all the processors I want.

Monitoring memory use

The same approach can be used to monitor the memory utilization within the NiFi JVM using the MonitorMemory reporting task. Have a look at the documentation of this reporting task here.

Monitoring back pressure on connections

There is also the SiteToSiteStatusReportingTask that will send details about the NiFi Controller status over Site-to-Site. This can be particularly useful to be notified when some processors are stopped, queues are full (and back pressure is enabled), or to build reports regarding NiFi performances. This reporting task will slightly be improved regarding back pressure (with NIFI-3791). In the meantime, if you want to receive notifications when back pressure is enabled on any connection, here is what you can do (assuming you know the back pressure thresholds):

Note that I configured the task to only send data about the connections but you can receive information for any kind of component.

And I use the following workflow: my input port to receive the flow files with the controller status (containing an array of JSON elements for all of my connections), then I split my array using SplitJson processor, then I use EvaluateJsonPath to extract as attributes the values queuedCount and queuedBytes and then I use a RouteOnAttribute processor to check if one of the two attributes I have is greater or equal than my thresholds, and if that’s the case I send the notification by email.

My RouteOnAttribute configuration:

Site to site reporting tasks are really useful and there are many ways to use the data they can send for monitoring purpose.

SiteToSiteProvenanceReportingTask

Note that you have also a Site2Site reporting task to send all the provenance events over S2S. This can be really useful if you want to send this information to external system.

While monitoring a dataflow, users often need a way to determine what happened to a particular data object (FlowFile). NiFi’s Data Provenance page provides that information. Because NiFi records and indexes data provenance details as objects flow through the system, users may perform searches, conduct troubleshooting and evaluate things like dataflow compliance and optimization in real time. By default, NiFi updates this information every five minutes, but that is configurable.

Besides, with NIFI-3859, this could also be used in a monitoring approach to only look for specific events according to custom parameters. It could be used, for instance, to check how long it takes for an event to go through NiFi and raise alerts in case an event took an unusual duration to be processed (have a look to the next article to see how this can be done differently).

As usual feel free to ask questions and comment this post.

Monitoring NiFi – Logback configuration

May 12, 2017May 12, 2017 pvillard3110 Comments

Note – This article is part of a series discussing subjects around NiFi monitoring.

There is one configuration file in NiFi that manages all the logging operations performed by NiFi: this file is in the configuration directory (NIFI_HOME/conf) and is named logback.xml. It is good to know that this file can be modified “on-the-fly” and it won’t be required to restart NiFi for the modifications to be taken into account.

This file is a common configuration file for the logback library which is a successor of the famous log4j project. Here is the official website. I won’t get into the details of logback itself (documentation is here) but here is a quick overview of the default configuration when using NiFi.

The most important log file in NiFi is certainly nifi-app.log which is created according to this configuration block:

    <appender name="APP_FILE" class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.RollingFileAppender">
        <file>${org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.log.dir}/nifi-app.log</file>
        <rollingPolicy class="ch.qos.logback.core.rolling.SizeAndTimeBasedRollingPolicy">
            <fileNamePattern>${org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.log.dir}/nifi-app_%d{yyyy-MM-dd_HH}.%i.log</fileNamePattern>
            <maxFileSize>100MB</maxFileSize>
            <maxHistory>30</maxHistory>
        </rollingPolicy>
        <immediateFlush>true</immediateFlush>
        <encoder class="ch.qos.logback.classic.encoder.PatternLayoutEncoder">
            <pattern>%date %level [%thread] %logger{40} %msg%n</pattern>
        </encoder>
    </appender>

    <root level="INFO">
        <appender-ref ref="APP_FILE"/>
    </root>

In this case, log file is rolling every hour or when the file is going over 100MB. Besides we only keep up to 30 files worth of history. Based on your retention policies you can update this file to meet your requirements.

Also note that, by default, you will have the following log files:

./logs/nifi-app.log
./logs/nifi-bootstrap.log
./logs/nifi-user.log

Now… what can we do to use this file for monitoring purpose? Some options here:

We can use the TailFile processor of NiFi to let NiFi tails its own log file and perform the required operation when some conditions are met. Example to send an HTTP request when logs of WARN and ERROR levels are detected:

We can also define new appenders in the log configuration file and change it according to our needs. In particular, we could be interested by the SMTP Appender that can send logs via emails based on quite a large set of conditions. Full documentation here.
Obviously you can also configure this configuration file so that NiFi log files integrate with your existing systems. An idea could be to configure a Syslog appender to also redirect the logs to an external system.

Few remarks regarding the logs as I see recurrent questions:

At the moment, there is no option to have a log file per processor or per process group. It is discussed by NIFI-3065. However such an approach could have performance implications since each log message would need to be routed to the correct log file.
Also, at the moment, the custom name of the processor is not displayed in the log messages (only the type is used). It is discussed by NIFI-3877. Right now it looks like:

2017-05-12 10:43:37,780 INFO [Timer-Driven Process Thread-4] o.a.nifi.processors.standard.InvokeHTTP InvokeHTTP[id=f7ebb153-015b-1000-f590-599786e16340] my log message…

This could be a solution in a multi-tenant environment (to get one log file per workflow/use case) assuming each “team” is following the same convention to name the components in the workflows.

As usual feel free to ask questions and comment this post.

Monitoring NiFi – Bootstrap notifier

May 11, 2017May 11, 2017 pvillard311 Comment

Note – This article is part of a series discussing subjects around NiFi monitoring.

When NiFi is running, there is more than one process running on the server. Let’s have a look:

[root@pvillard-hdf-2 ~]# ps -ef | grep nifi
nifi     19380     1  0 12:33 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/hdf/current/nifi/bin/nifi.sh start
nifi     19382 19380  0 12:33 ?        00:00:06 /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_131//bin/java -cp /usr/hdf/current/nifi/conf:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/bootstrap/* -Xms12m -Xmx24m -Dorg.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.log.dir=/var/log/nifi -Dorg.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.pid.dir=/var/run/nifi -Dorg.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.file=/usr/hdf/current/nifi/conf/bootstrap.conf org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.RunNiFi start
nifi     19419 19382  7 12:33 ?        00:07:36 /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_131/bin/java -classpath /usr/hdf/current/nifi/conf:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.7.12.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/jul-to-slf4j-1.7.12.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/log4j-over-slf4j-1.7.12.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/logback-classic-1.1.3.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/logback-core-1.1.3.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-runtime-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-api-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-documentation-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-framework-api-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-nar-utils-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/slf4j-api-1.7.12.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-properties-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar -Dorg.apache.jasper.compiler.disablejsr199=true -Xmx512m -Xms512m -Dambari.application.id=nifi -Dambari.metrics.collector.url=http://pvillard-hdf-1:6188/ws/v1/timeline/metrics -Dsun.net.http.allowRestrictedHeaders=true -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djava.awt.headless=true -XX:+UseG1GC -Djava.protocol.handler.pkgs=sun.net.www.protocol -Dnifi.properties.file.path=/usr/hdf/current/nifi/conf/nifi.properties -Dnifi.bootstrap.listen.port=39585 -Dapp=NiFi -Dorg.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.log.dir=/var/log/nifi org.apache.nifi.NiFi -k A2EA52795B33AB2F21C93E7E820D08369F1448478C877F4C710D6E85FD904AE6

As you can see, the script is running a bootstrap (running a JVM between 12 and 24MB) that is in charge of the NiFi JVM itself. In this example, the script is running with the PID 19380 and is the parent of the bootstrap process running with PID 19382. The bootstrap itself is the parent of NiFi running with the PID 19419.

If you only kill the NiFi process, the bootstrap will detect it and automatically relaunch NiFi for you:

kill -9 19419

Then I have:

nifi     19380     1  0 12:33 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/hdf/current/nifi/bin/nifi.sh start
nifi     19382 19380  0 12:33 ?        00:00:06 /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_131//bin/java -cp /usr/hdf/current/nifi/conf:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/bootstrap/* -Xms12m -Xmx24m -Dorg.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.log.dir=/var/log/nifi -Dorg.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.pid.dir=/var/run/nifi -Dorg.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.file=/usr/hdf/current/nifi/conf/bootstrap.conf org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.RunNiFi start
nifi     24702 19382 99 14:20 ?        00:00:05 /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_131/bin/java -classpath /usr/hdf/current/nifi/conf:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/jcl-over-slf4j-1.7.12.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/jul-to-slf4j-1.7.12.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/log4j-over-slf4j-1.7.12.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/logback-classic-1.1.3.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/logback-core-1.1.3.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-runtime-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-api-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-documentation-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-framework-api-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-nar-utils-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/slf4j-api-1.7.12.jar:/usr/hdf/current/nifi/lib/nifi-properties-1.1.0.2.1.2.0-10.jar -Dorg.apache.jasper.compiler.disablejsr199=true -Xmx512m -Xms512m -Dambari.application.id=nifi -Dambari.metrics.collector.url=http://pvillard-hdf-1:6188/ws/v1/timeline/metrics -Dsun.net.http.allowRestrictedHeaders=true -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Djava.awt.headless=true -XX:+UseG1GC -Djava.protocol.handler.pkgs=sun.net.www.protocol -Dnifi.properties.file.path=/usr/hdf/current/nifi/conf/nifi.properties -Dnifi.bootstrap.listen.port=39585 -Dapp=NiFi -Dorg.apache.nifi.bootstrap.config.log.dir=/var/log/nifi org.apache.nifi.NiFi -k A2EA52795B33AB2F21C93E7E820D08369F1448478C877F4C710D6E85FD904AE6

As you can see the NiFi process has a new PID since it is a new process launched by the bootstrap.

You can find more information about the bootstrap system in the administration guide. One interesting feature with this bootstrap approach is the bootstrap notifier. It allows you to configure a notification service that will be triggered when the bootstrap starts, stops or detects an interruption of the NiFi process.

With the new version of Apache NiFi (1.2.0), you can send notification to an HTTP(S) endpoint. If you need a custom notification service (example: send SNMP traps), it’s not that hard: you just need to extend AbstractNotificationService. You can have a look at the two existing implementations: email notifier and HTTP notifier.

Let’s configure our NiFi to use the email notification service and see what is the result. On each node of our cluster, we need to update the bootstrap.conf configuration file as below:

###
# Notification Services for notifying interested parties when NiFi is stopped, started, dies
###

# XML File that contains the definitions of the notification services
notification.services.file=./conf/bootstrap-notification-services.xml

# In the case that we are unable to send a notification for an event, how many times should we retry?
notification.max.attempts=5

# Comma-separated list of identifiers that are present in the notification.services.file; which services should be used to notify when NiFi is started?
nifi.start.notification.services=email-notification

# Comma-separated list of identifiers that are present in the notification.services.file; which services should be used to notify when NiFi is stopped?
nifi.stop.notification.services=email-notification

# Comma-separated list of identifiers that are present in the notification.services.file; which services should be used to notify when NiFi dies?
nifi.dead.notification.services=email-notification

In this case, we are saying that the configuration of our notification services (we can define and use multiple notifiers) is in the file

./conf/bootstrap-notification-services.xml

and that we want to use the notifier called “email-notification” (that’s the default name defined in the XML configuration file) for stop, start, and dead events. As stated in the documentation, it’s possible to define a list of notifiers for each type of event.

For this demonstration, I’ll use my Gmail account and the Gmail SMTP server to send the notifications (obviously, with this example, NiFi needs a public internet access to send the requests to the SMTP server). Here is the configuration file:

<services>
     <service>
        <id>email-notification</id>
        <class>org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.notification.email.EmailNotificationService</class>
        <property name="SMTP Hostname">smtp.gmail.com</property>
        <property name="SMTP Port">587</property>
        <property name="SMTP Username">my-email-address@gmail.com</property>
        <property name="SMTP Password">myPassword</property>
        <property name="SMTP TLS">true</property>
        <property name="From">"NiFi Service Notifier"</property>
        <property name="To">email address that will receive the notifications</property>
     </service>
</services>

Here are the emails I received when restarting NiFi or killing the NiFi process:

Start event

Title: NiFi Started on Host pvillard-hdf-2 (172.26.249.33)

Hello,

Apache NiFi has been started on host pvillard-hdf-2 (172.26.249.33) at 2017/04/27 22:15:01.376 by user nifi

Stop event

Title: NiFi Stopped on Host pvillard-hdf-2 (172.26.249.33)

Hello,

Apache NiFi has been told to initiate a shutdown on host pvillard-hdf-2 (172.26.249.33) at 2017/04/27 22:14:35.702 by user nifi

Dead event

Title: NiFi Died on Host pvillard-hdf-2 (172.26.249.33)

Hello,

It appears that Apache NiFi has died on host pvillard-hdf-2 (172.26.249.33) at 2017/04/28 09:52:01.973; automatically restarting NiFi

OK, now let’s see how to configure the HTTP notification service. Let’s say I have a web server listening here:

http://pvillard-hdf-4:9999/notification

My XML configuration is now:

<services>
     <service>
        <id>email-notification</id>
        <class>org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.notification.email.EmailNotificationService</class>
        <property name="SMTP Hostname">smtp.gmail.com</property>
        <property name="SMTP Port">587</property>
        <property name="SMTP Username">my-email-address@gmail.com</property>
        <property name="SMTP Password">myPassword</property>
        <property name="SMTP TLS">true</property>
        <property name="From">"NiFi Service Notifier"</property>
        <property name="To">email address that will receive the notifications</property>
     </service>
     <service>
        <id>http-notification</id>
        <class>org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.notification.http.HttpNotificationService</class>
        <property name="URL">http://pvillard-hdf-4:9999/notification</property>
     </service>
</services>

And my bootstrap.conf configuration file now contains:

###
# Notification Services for notifying interested parties when NiFi is stopped, started, dies
###

# XML File that contains the definitions of the notification services
notification.services.file=./conf/bootstrap-notification-services.xml

# In the case that we are unable to send a notification for an event, how many times should we retry?
notification.max.attempts=5

# Comma-separated list of identifiers that are present in the notification.services.file; which services should be used to notify when NiFi is started?
nifi.start.notification.services=email-notification,http-notification

# Comma-separated list of identifiers that are present in the notification.services.file; which services should be used to notify when NiFi is stopped?
nifi.stop.notification.services=email-notification,http-notification

# Comma-separated list of identifiers that are present in the notification.services.file; which services should be used to notify when NiFi dies?
nifi.dead.notification.services=email-notification,http-notification

I now restart NiFi, and I can confirm that I receive a notification (I used a standalone NiFi to confirm the reception of the notification):

The content of the notification is the same as with the email notification service. Note that it’s also possible to configure properties for a keystore and a truststore to send notifications using HTTPS:

<service>
   <id>http-notification</id>
   <class>org.apache.nifi.bootstrap.notification.http.HttpNotificationService</class>

   /* The URL to send the notification to */
   <property name="URL"></property>

   /* Max wait time for connection to remote service - default is 10s */
   <property name="Connection timeout"></property>

   /* Max wait time for remote service to read the request sent - default is 10s */
   <property name="Write timeout"></property>

   /* The fully-qualified filename of the Truststore */
   <property name="Truststore Filename"></property>

   /* The Type of the Truststore. Either JKS or PKCS12 */
   <property name="Truststore Type"></property>

   /* The password for the Truststore */
   <property name="Truststore Password"></property>

   /* The fully-qualified filename of the Keystore */
   <property name="Keystore Filename"></property>

   /* The Type of the Keystore. Either JKS or PKCS12 */
   <property name="Keystore Type"></property>

   /* The password for the Keystore */
   <property name="Keystore Password"></property>

   /* The password for the key. If this is not specified, but the Keystore Filename, Password, and Type are specified, then the Keystore Password will be assumed to be the same as the Key Password */
   <property name="Key Password"></property>

   /* The algorithm to use for this SSL context. Either TLS or SSL */
   <property name="SSL Protocol"></property>
</service>

Note that I also received an email notification since I specified the two notifiers in the configuration.

Again, if you need a custom notifier, this should not be really difficult and you are more than welcome to contribute your notifier code to the Apache community. It will give more options to users when setting a bootstrap notifier.

As usual feel free to ask questions and comment this post.

Monitoring NiFi – Introduction

May 11, 2017May 22, 2017 pvillard3111 Comments

Apache NiFi 1.2.0 has just been released with a lot of very cool new features… and I take this opportunity to start a series of articles around monitoring. This is a recurring subject and I often hear the same questions. This series won’t provide an exhaustive list of the ways you can use to monitor NiFi (with or without HDF) but, at least, it should get you started!

Here is a quick summary of the subjects that will be covered:

For this series of article, I will use, as a demo environment, a 4-nodes HDF cluster (running on CentOS 7):

One management node (for Ambari, Ambari metrics, Grafana, etc)
Three nodes for NiFi – secured using the NiFi CA (provided with the NiFi toolkit)

I’m using HDF to take advantage of Ambari to ease the deployment but this is not mandatory for what I’m going to discuss in the articles (except for stuff around the Ambari reporting task obviously).

I will not cover how setting up this environment but if this is something you are looking after, feel free to ask questions (here or on the Hortonworks Community Connection) and to have a look into Hortonworks documentation about HDF.

I don’t want to write a single (very) long article and for the sake of clarity there is one article per listed subject. Also, I’ll try to update the articles to stick as best as possible to latest features provided by NiFi over time.

Also, if you feel that some subjects should be added to the list, let me know and I’ll do my best to cover other monitoring-related questions.

	Thuy Le on NiFi & NiFi Registry on th…
	sujeeth on NiFi and OAuth 2.0 to request…
	Lucas on Secured NiFi cluster with Terr…
	Harsha on NiFi 1.7+ – Terminate…
	Vishwa on Integration of NiFi with …

Pierre Villard

Some notes to share…

Month: May 2017

Monitoring NiFi – Scripted Reporting Task

Monitoring NiFi – Ambari & Grafana

Monitoring NiFi – Workflow SLA

Monitoring NiFi – Site2Site reporting tasks

Monitoring NiFi – Logback configuration

Monitoring NiFi – Bootstrap notifier

Monitoring NiFi – Introduction