Configuration

Both Base and VDP automatically load a .env file that contains key/value pairs defining required environment variables. You can customize the file based on your configuration.

Besides, they use Koanf library for configuration. It supports loading configuration from multiple sources and makes it available to the service. To override the default configuration file, you can set the corresponding environment variable in the compose file in Base and VDP. All configuration environment variables for each service are prefixed with CFG_.

#Configuring Base services

Read the default configuration files for a full overview of all supported configuration options of each service:

• mgmt-backend(localhost:8084): a service to handle user management, token management, and metrics
• console(localhost:3000): a Web-based UI app to provide a unified, clean, and intuitive user experience of Base, VDP and Model

#Configuring service version

Set the environment variable for a specific service to determine which version to use in VDP.

The combination of default versions in .env file is fully tested for compatibility. Unless you are debugging and testing, updating the default versions in the .env file is discouraged.

#Configuring how to access Base and VDP via Console

To access Base and VDP via Console, set the hosts by overriding the environment variables:

By default they are set to localhost.

#Configuring the observability stack

Observability is critical for distributed microservice architecture. Through OpenTelemetry, we can generate, collect and export metrics, logs and traces to help analyse the performance and behaviour of VDP services.

The observability stack is disabled by default. You can enable the stack setting OBSERVE_ENABLED=true in the .env file. The following telemetry tools are supported now:

• Jaeger (localhost:16686): OpenTelemetry allows us to export spans to Jaeger. Use Jaeger when you want to debug the complete flow of a request through the VDP services.
• InfluxDB (localhost: 8086, username:admin, password:password): detailed metrics are sent to InfluxDB for monitoring, and are imported into the Grafana dashboard
• Grafana (localhost:3002, username:admin, password:admin): the Grafana dashboard visualises the metrics to monitor the performance and anomalies of VDP services
• Prometheus (localhost:9090): VDP exports metrics like vdp_pipeline_sync_trigger_counter_total (total number of triggers from SYNC pipelines) and vdp_pipeline_async_trigger_counter_total (total number of triggers from ASYNC pipelines) to Prometheus.

Set the environment variable for a specific telemetry tool to determine which version to use in Base.

#Configuring VDP services

Read the default configuration files for a full overview of all supported configuration options of each service:

• pipeline-backend(localhost:8081): a service to build and manage unstructured data pipelines
• connector-backend(localhost:8082): a service to create and manage connectors for composing data pipelines
• controller-vdp: a non-public service to monitor the states of pipeline and connector resources

#Configuring VDP service version

Set the environment variable for a specific service to determine which version to use in VDP.

The combination of default versions in .env file is fully tested for compatibility. Unless you are debugging and testing, updating the default versions in the .env file is discouraged.

#Anonymised Usage Collection

To help us better understand how VDP is used and can be improved, VDP collects and reports anonymised usage statistics.

#What data is collected

When a new VDP is running, the usage client in services including pipeline-backend, connector-backend, and mgmt-backend in VDP will ask for a new session, respectively. Our usage server returns a token used for future reporting. For each session, we collect Session data including some basic information about the service and the system details the service is running on:

• name of the service to collect data from, e.g., SERVICE_CONNECTOR for connector-backend
• edition of the service to identify the deployment, e.g., local-ce for local community edition deployment
• version of the service, e.g., 0.5.0-alpha
• architecture of the system the service is running on, e.g., amd64
• operating system the service is running on, e.g., Linux
• uptime in seconds to identify the rough life span of the service

Each session is assigned a random UUID for tracking and identification. Then, each session will collect and send its own SessionReport data every 10 minutes:

• MgmtUsageData reports data for mgmt-backend session
  • information of the onboarded User
• ConnectorUsageData reports data for connector-backend session of the onboarded User
  • UUID of the onboarded User
  • number of connected or disconnected Sources
  • number of connected or disconnected Destinations
  • an array of SourceConnectorDefinition of the Sources
  • an array of DestinationConnectorDefinition of the Destinations
• PipelineUsageData reports data for pipeline-backend session of the onboarded User
  • UUID of the onboarded User
  • number of active and inactive Pipelines
  • number of SYNC and ASYNC Pipelines
  • number of images processed by the Pipelines

You can check the full usage data structs in protobufs. These data do not allow us to track Personal Data but enable us to measure session counts and usage statistics.

#Implementation

The anonymous usage report client library is in usage-client. To limit risk exposure, we keep the usage server implementation private for now. In summary, the Session data and SessionReport sent from each session get updated in the usage server.

Additionally, The frontend Console sends event data to Amplitude.

#Opting out

VDP usage collection helps the entire community. We'd appreciate it if you can leave it on. However, if you want to opt out, you can disable it by overriding the .env file in Base and VDP:

This will disable the VDP usage collection for the entire project.

#Acknowledgements

Our anonymised usage collection was inspired by KrakenD's How we built our telemetry service and would love to acknowledge that their design has helped us to bootstrap our usage collection project.