Hello,
I’d like to understand the options available to provide a customer a read-only view of Dataminer via a DMZ.
Can I stand up a Dataminer instance and Cassandra database in my DMZ and replicate the production Cassandra database to it for an as close to real time view?
Hi Ben,
There are a variety of options available to consider, in relation to sharing data with external parties / your customers.
But it depends a bit on the exact use case to define what the best solution would be. How many customers you want to share with, what kind of data you want to share, do you want to offer them data to view on a web UI or just raw data that they will ingest and process with their own tools, would there be a lot of changes (i.e. is it a pretty static pre-defined set of data, or would that change frequently over time to serve different purposes and use cases), etc.
One great way of sharing data for example with external parties in general, is our new dashboard sharing service. The key advantages of that would be that 1) on your end you only have to make your DataMiner System cloud-connected (no additional investments in infrastructure to set up and maintain), 2) very secure and scalable out of the box, 3) very flexible i.e. you can just create dashboards and mash up all the pieces of data and information that you want to share with the third party, and with a single click share that with them (pretty similar to like sharing a file online, you only require a mail address for the recipient) – and of course at any time you start or stop the share, add or remove data that you share with them, etc.
Of course there are also a variety of other options to replicate data, or as you indicated extend your DataMiner System into your DMZ and provide access through native DataMiner System user accounts, or we have users that integrate via DataMiner APIs to bring some of the DataMiner data into their web tools / customers portals, etc.
Here’s an example of how the Dashboard Sharing works: DataMiner Live Dashboard Sharing – DataMiner Dojo
But maybe you can provide some more details about your use case? So that we can make more specific recommendations, suited for your goals?
Hi Ben, apologies for the late reply, overlooked getting back to you on this one. Indeed, if you want to share data with a 3rd party, you would have settle for some way of getting data across to your DMZ and from there to serve it up to that 3rd party online. But replicating all the data into another DataMiner System in the DMZ feels quite intense to me, if it were to be done just for that sole purpose. The kind of replication required would definitely not be a database replication also, because that would not work as you want it. DataMiner derives the data and alarms and all off that from communicating with a device, and then stores some of that data in the database (i.e. it does not poll it from the device to put in the database and then derive it from there, so your new DataMiner System would not show the elements with their data and alarms and all that based on a copy of the database). But there is a replication function in DataMiner, which allows you to replicate an element from one DataMiner System to anther, and that gives you the results that you are looking for. Although (separate from the licensing which we could discuss), this still feels like a complex solution for that specific purpose. Because the Dashboard Sharing service actually does sound like the ideal and easy solution for this, and it can also be done through a gateway-type of component in your DMZ. Maybe we should set up a session to run through all the different options, so that you can evaluate those in detail?
Forgot the link for more information on the native capability for Replication of Elements in DataMiner. https://help.dataminer.services/dataminer/DataMinerUserGuide/part_2/elements/Replicating_elements.htm
Yes please, a quick call ASAP would be great…
Hi Ben, we’ll make that happen!
Hello Ben,
Thanks for the response. I would like my customer to be able to see a read only Web UI from their network without them having access to my network where the main dataminer servers are hosted.
I assume the dashboard sharing service is web based, my solution operates in an offline deployment with no internet connectivity and therefore believe this would need to be achieved via a DMZ.
If I were to replicate into a DMZ:
1) Would I need to double my endpoint licensing costs, support costs etc? This is just a replication of data, it won’t be directly contacting end devices.
2) How would dataminer react to the database being updated via replication? Can it simply display the data in the replicated database and show accurate device statuses without being able to actually contact the end device?