HPA Portal installation Architecture design

Architecture

HPA Architecture Design

HPA is based on the Broadcom APM product. An APM aims to record metrics on the internal behavior of an application without modifiying the source code.

The main components are :

  • An agent, installed on the same server that host the application, here Calypso
  • An external server to store the data in the EntepriseManager and consult metrics through the HPA portal & webview

Agent do not store any data on the Calypso server (except a few log files), data is sent over the network every 15s.

Agent is a 150MB archive to unzip, it starts with each JVM by adding new arguments to the command line.

Technical architecture

Here is a high level architecture schema for the HPA Portal solution.

The main flows are :

  • HPA Calypso agent to EM : metrics are recorded on the agents and stored in the Broadcom datastorage.
  • End users requests a dashboard on the HPA portal : the request is sent to HPA portal client or server (this is an Single Page Application and use XHR requests)
  • HPA Portal server request the data to HPA extractor and aggregate it for the dashboards
  • HPA Extractor get the metrics from EM or its local database.

HPA Architecture Design

End user connect to HPA portal, it exposes a single page application that loads the dynamic content using XHR requests.

The HPA portal server itself do not consume Broadcom API directly. A middle layer, the HPA extractor, is used to gather the data, it exposes a standard REST API for the HPA portal server. This API cover :

  • Text metrics read in HPA postgresql
  • Numerical metrics through APM SQLServer.

The HPA extractor must be as close as possible to the Broadcom API (APMSQL/EM) because it extracts a lot of data, aggregate it before building the responses. The network bandwidth is critical between Extractor and EM.

The requirements for the installation of this architecture are described in the next section

Flows

The flow are based on different protocols :

  • HTTP REST between HPA portal components
  • HTTP SOAP for Broadcom API
  • JDBC for Broadcom APMSQL
  • Specific binary protocol between agent and Broadcom EM
  • All ports can be modified
  • All listening IP can be modified
  • All flows can go through proxies
  • All flows support TLS

See Firewall rules

User interfaces

There is many user interface as the product is based on Broadcom APM.

Broadcom APM offers two GUI :

  • Teamcenter and webview, accessible from a browser
  • Workstation, a fat client (available on Windows or Linux), used for some specific alert configuration

The HPA portal exposes its own GUI.