Will the Swarming element action be triggered based on a Element failure automatically ?

182 viewsswarming
5
0 Comments

Hi , I'm reading the description of Swarming at docs page.

In this page, it says

Swarming makes it possible to recover functionalities from failing nodes by moving activities hosted on such a node to the remaining nodes.

Does the swarming be triggered automatically at the failure of agent nodes, or tat the failure of an element  ?

Another question is, does Swarming support Services, not only Elements ?

I'm not talking about the bookings, but the Services what will be generated by bookings.

Bert Vandenberghe [SLC] [DevOps Enabler] Answered question 21st January 2025

1 Answer

5
7.82K 4 Comments

Hi Mahito,

Today swarming is not yet triggering automatically out of the box. But there is an API to swarm your elements, so when detecting certain conditions, swarming can be easily triggered. In the next versions, we will also start working on more build-in detection so that swarming can happen automatically without the need to add a trigger yourself.

Services are not yet swarmable, but that is also something which will be added in one of the upcoming versions.

What is swarmable or not, is documented in the righmost column of that table in the limitations section of the following page: Swarming | DataMiner Docs

Let us know if you would have any other questions.

Bert

Robbe De Ghein [SLC] [DevOps Advocate] Posted new comment 3rd February 2025
Mahito Murakami [DevOps Advocate] commented

Hi Bert,

Thank you for your prompt reply.
That's great news !

Would you please tell me what is the expected timeline of those features ?
e.g. automatic swarming, support of Service swarming.
Pieter Van Compernolle [SLC] [DevOps Enabler] commented

Hi Mahito,
I can't give you an exact date today, but the expectation is that this will come in one of the 10.5 feature releases (so this year). As soon as more details are available, I give you an update.
In the meanwhile, please share your use cases for swarming with us either here on dojo or share them via mail (pieter.van.compernolle@skyline.be) in case it's confidential. This can help us in making the most valuable priority decisions.
Mahito Murakami [DevOps Advocate] commented

Hi Pieter and Bert,

Would you please tell me where I can find the API for swarming ?
And, do you have any trigger examples ?

I'm curious how I can add a trigger for swarming elements,
– shall I setup external box to monitor agent status within DMS to trigger swarming by sending certain API ?
– In this case, what would be the endpoint of the API at the DMS ? , etc.
– Can I use correlation rule to trigger one of the agent failure condition to swarm Elements ?
etc.
Robbe De Ghein [SLC] [DevOps Advocate] commented

Hi Mahito,

An example on how to swarm a single element to a target agent via a regular automation script can be found here: https://docs.dataminer.services/user-guide/Advanced_Functionality/Swarming/SwarmingElements.html?q=swarming#swarming-elements-via-automation

As this is an automation script, you can trigger it from anywhere in DataMiner, correlation included (in the 'Actions' section, you can select 'Run Script').

If you would like to trigger this from outside DataMiner, you could use a "User-Defined APIs" special automation script which exposes a http endpoint that you can trigger.

See docs: https://docs.dataminer.services/user-guide/Advanced_Modules/User-Defined_APIs/UD_APIs.html.

As to what to trigger on, there are multiple options.
Some examples:
Check if the element is in error.
Check if the agent has RTEs.
Check if any agent is disconnected/unreachable.

Note that Swarming requires DataMiner 10.5.1 or higher.