[rabbitmq-discuss] RabbitMQ Administration API

[Edwin Fine]

John,

Thanks for the reference to the earlier discussion. I missed that one. I am
also influenced to some degree by what MQ did for its admin control.

I'd like to contrast my approach with the QPID one.

My approach was extremely pragmatic and bottom-up. It did not try to solve
all the problems and create a grand design. The QPID approach is at the
opposite end of the spectrum. Both approaches have merits and shortcomings.
Mine is very limited and short-sighted, but has the advantage of being very
easy to understand, and immediately available to play with and get a feel
for what is wanted and needed. The QPID approach would take a great deal
more work, and testing, just to get something usable on RabbitMQ. This
impedes progress. I have always been a proponent of eliciting realistic
requirements by prototyping (as long as the prototype does not suddenly
become the production version, which is always a danger). It grounds us in
practicalities right from the start. Once we see what actually works, we do
another iteration to expand the design to become more generic. Another
disadvantage is that we may not think of a very important feature until late
in the game, and have to change the entire architecture. That's why it's
best to get high-level requirements up front, in a timeboxed fashion to
prevent analysis paralysis, and then try the various features out for
real-world usability, and iterate until cooked.

QPID's approach is interesting in that it uses the AMQP protocol itself as
the communication mechanism. I quite like this idea from the point of view
that every AMQP language binding will be able to use it. On the other hand,
it's a bit clumsy and heavyweight in that you have to set up one or more
private queues just to talk the the management broker, and as far as I can
see, it's very generic, so I am uncertain of exactly what capabilities are
exposed (e.g. how do you delete a queue?).

The major QPID concepts seem to be:

   - Defining the concept of a flexible schema structure
   - Querying object information
   - Setting up monitoring
   - Calling object methods
   - Defining the communication protocol

It suddenly struck me as I was writing this that there is already a very
well defined standard that does all this, which is SNMP. Since SNMP is a
widely-used standard, and Erlang supports it, and SNMP v3 has security
features built in, and SNMP allows one to monitor, configure and control any
arbitrary object, shouldn't we consider adding an SNMP agent to RabbitMQ,
and using SNMP for all these tasks?

The huge advantage of this is that it makes a RabbitMQ node automatically
become part of any SNMP management infrastructure. There are many existing
SNMP Management tools, and a lot of information and books on SNMP. Another
huge advantage is it would not be reinventing the wheel. The disadvantage is
that it is orthogonal to AMQP, but maybe that's not such a bad thing.

The task then becomes mostly one of defining appropriate MIBs that can
describe, monitor and control an AMQP infrastructure.

Thoughts? Am I missing something?

Regards,
Edwin Fine
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 9:27 AM, John Watson <JWatson at sis.tv> wrote:

>  When this was discussed earlier on the rabbit forum:-
> http://www.trapexit.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=37702 I thought that one of
> the most interesting responses described the approach taken by QPID:
> http://cwiki.apache.org/qpid/management-design-notes.html .
>
>
>
> Cheers
>
> John Watson
>
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-- 
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate,
contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and
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discomfort of thought.
John F. Kennedy 35th president of US 1961-1963 (1917 - 1963)
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