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IT Infrastructure Monitoring for a multinational customer
IT Infrastructure Monitoring for a multinational customer 1600 721 Nubisware

In the last few months we’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with a multinational customer in order to implement an Observability solution for their rather complex IT infrastructure.

Thanks to our previous experience and know-how, we’ve been aware of the requirements we were asked to satisfy since the first meetings.
Among these requirements, the most relevant ones are failure prevention and downtime reduction which were often the cause of productivity loss. The main objective of the project had to be achieved by observing, measuring and notifying, in near real-time, malfunctions or overload that caused slow-downs or interruptions of the company’s industrial pipelines. Other objectives were: a centralized monitoring dashboard for a uniform overview of all, heterogeneous components of the infrastructure; performance optimization through the ex-post analysis of metrics and identification of bottlenecks; the creation of a solid technological base upon which solutions for proactive self-healing can be designed.

The challenge was thus the implementation of an observability solution for the geographically distributed datacenters of our customer. Those datacenters comprise dozens of servers ranging from rather ancient legacy hardware (Slackware 8) to modern virtualized servers based on Ubuntu 22 and Windows 11.
The servers act with diverse roles: databases, web servers, firewalls and industrial machinery controllers equipped with proprietary software.

Approach and Achievements

To meet our customer’s needs, we conducted a comprehensive survey of their infrastructure and decided to base our solution on Prometheus, Grafana and Ansible, tools that we master and that we are able to customize in depth. Here’s how we delivered:

  • Deployment and Configuration
    • A centralized monitoring server was set up, hosting Prometheus and Grafana.
    • We leveraged Ansible to script the provisioning process, enabling centralized and repeatable configurations.
  • Metrics Collection
    • Standard exporters were deployed to gather metrics from operating systems, databases, and web servers.
    • We developed custom exporters in Python for older systems that couldn’t support modern dependencies.
  • Tailored Observability for Industrial Processes
    • Custom metrics were integrated to monitor and verify the processes controlling industrial machinery, ensuring business-critical systems operated seamlessly.
  • Alerting and Notifications
    • Alerts were configured for various key metrics.
    • Notifications were integrated with Microsoft Teams and email, ensuring prompt action on critical issues.

This tailored observability solution has empowered our customer with real-time insights and full control over their complex infrastructure. For us, this project was a fantastic opportunity to expand our expertise, mastering: Prometheus exporters (including writing dedicated ones); Grafana dashboarding, with intricate queries and visualizations; complex alerting systems tied to real-world processes.

Conclusion

This collaboration stands as a testament to our team’s commitment to solving complex challenges and delivering robust, scalable solutions. We’re proud to have not only met but exceeded expectations, enabling our customer to achieve unprecedented observability for its critical systems.

Got a complex infrastructure challenge? Let’s solve it together!

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The contribution of Nubisware to the MOVING project
The contribution of Nubisware to the MOVING project 2560 1331 Nubisware

On October 31st, 2024, the MOVING project (MOuntain Valorisation through INterconnectedness and Green growth) has offically come to its conclusion. Nubisware participated to the project as a linked third party of the Italian National Council of Research (CNR-ISTI). Nubisware developed software components supporting the project with a novel approach (referred to as Weblet and described later). Additionally Nubisware designed and developed the MOVING Mountains APP for Android and iOS devices. The mobile App has been developed under the responsibility of the University of Cordoba (UCO), the project coordinator. This app integrates with the services of the project’s institutional portal and the D4Science infrastructure.

The MOVING project was funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program, Grant Agreement No. 862739. Its goal was to improve the resilience to climate change of European mountain regions. MOVING engaged 23 European partners and collaborated with 23 mountain areas across 16 countries to propose policy initiatives supporting value chains in mountain areas. It focused on three key priorities: climate change adaptation, promotion of sustainable practices, and creation of incentives for enhancing mountain products. Among the project’s key achievements were: integrated policies linking agriculture, forestry, and tourism, supporting resilient food systems and biodiversity protection, as well as proposals for engaging local stakeholders in effective policy-making and better inclusion of mountain regions in future EU-funded programs.

In the project, CNR-ISTI has been one of the main technological partners. It provided technical support and training for users of the Virtual Research Environments (VREs) implemented on the D4Science infrastructure. These VREs are crucial in projects involving various scientific partners across Europe, offering web tools and services to manage distributed virtual laboratories. Consortium members could connect, communicate, organize work, share and compare documents, data, and data analysis, thereby promoting Open Science practices.

Weblet

The D4Science infrastructure is a complex system comprising headless services and web interfaces based on Liferay Portal and thus constrained by this specific technology. To overcome these limitations, Nubisware worked, within MOVING, on a novel concept named Weblet and based on web components technology.

The Weblet concept draws inspiration from Micro-frontends, providing modular and reusable UI components, and Web-components, which allow the creation of isolated HTML, JavaScript, and CSS elements that can be easily integrated into web pages. Weblets are interactive frontend elements that securely communicate with D4Science services, designed to be embeddable, composable, and reusable in external web portals or third-party web applications, regardless of their implementation technology.

Examples of Weblets include the d4s-boot, a Weblet for managing authentication and authorization via Single-Sign-On and making secure backend service requests; the d4s-social, which implements interactive interfaces for D4Science’s Social Network service; the d4s-storage, which provides interface and interactions with the Storage Hub and Workspace services.

This approach has been successfully tested, integrating Weblets into existing portals and other platforms, such as WordPress, Jupyter Notebooks, and the MOVING Mountains APP.

MOVING Mountains APP

The MOVING Mountains APP is available in the official app stores for mobile devices:

Get it on Google Play

Download on the App Store

It is free to install and features public sections in addition to reserved sections for project members and stakeholders.

Public sections in the App are native mobile implementations of content also found on the project’s official website: “About,” “News,” and “Blog.” An “Events” section is publicly available in order to synchronize the user’s personal calendar with the calendar feed of the project’s portal thus allowing easy registration for events and receiving notifications as the events approach.

The app also has a “Community” section accessible for registered users of the project’s Virtual Research Environment, including members of the European Multi-Actor Platform (EU MAP). This section serves as an agora where the MOVING community can share ideas, documents, articles, knowledge, initiatives, and trends related to mountain area value chains. It can also be used as a traveler’s logbook for sharing photos, comments, and experiences of specific regions and places, navigable via an integrated interactive map. The “Community” section benefited from the d4s-boot and d4s-social Weblets, validating the approach.

The landing page
Events section
Interactive map
Login screen
Social section

In conclusion, over the four years of the project, Nubisware successfully met the project’s needs and requirements. It also had the opportunity to research, develop, and experiment with new technologies and solutions further enhancing the company’s expertise to the benefit of our products and customers. Feel free to email us for any needs!

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Nubisware is one of OpenAIRE-Advance Innovation Call Phase 1 winners
Nubisware is one of OpenAIRE-Advance Innovation Call Phase 1 winners 1365 428 Nubisware

And now it’s official: Nubisware made it to get into the list of participants allowed to access Phase 1 of the OpenAIRE-Advance Open Innovation Call, started at on November 2019. The news has been published on the official OpenAIRE site at https://www.openaire.eu/open-innovation-in-openaire.

OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) is a distributed infrastructure supporting Open Science. It is able to collect, aggregate, de-duplicate and index information related to research projects, articles and scientific journals, open data sources, etc. making them available for interested user communities.

OpenAIRE stems from a set of EU funded projects with the intent to make academic communication more open and transparent and to foster innovative methods for spreading and monitor research. It is currently an integral part of the European Open Science Cloud platform with whom it shares the objectives.

Nubisware has always adhered to the “Open” philosophy by exploiting it in the context of products developed for its customer and by actively supporting and maintaining open source projects.

Therefore we decided to participate to the OpenAIRE-Advance Open Innovation Call, submitting a proposal for the implementation of a component AIRE Lab which could enable the experimentation of new functionality and techniques on the aggregation data workflow (DAW).

We are very pleased that our proposal has been considered valid and has matched the challenging selection criteria of the evaluating commission obtaining thus the funding for the first phase.

Blue Cloud team
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Blue-Nubis for Blue-Cloud
Blue-Nubis for Blue-Cloud 5184 3888 Nubisware

Let the Blue Sky meet the Blue Sea and all is Blue for a time. – Moncy Barbour –

You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. – Rabindranath Tagore –

October 2nd to October 4th 2019 Nubisware attended the Kickoff meeting of the Blue-Cloud project, funded under H2020-EU.3.2.5.1. european program.

Blue-Cloud addresses the European IA ‘The Future of Seas and Oceans Flagship Initiative’ (BG-07-2019-2020) for the following topic: [A] 2019 – Blue Cloud services. The project implements a practical approach to better understand & manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a set of five pilot Blue-Cloud demonstrators. 

Nubisware as linked third party of the ISTI-CNR will be involved in the design and development of cloud based IT services for supporting the five pilots on challenging tasks like data analytics and object publishing.

In the beautiful venue of Domus Comeliana, under the shadow of Pisa’s Leaning Tower, the meeting has been a nice occasion to get in touch with valuable scientists, technicians and managers from many EU academic institutions and worldwide organizations such as FAO. Everyone with huge Sea and Ocean related background and knowledge.

We are sure that this project will be a great motivation for Nubisware to pull up the anchor and start sailing into an ocean of opportunities.

Update of December 4th: You can read more details in the official press release of December 2019.

Update of November 18th: A video about the meeting has been officially published and you can watch it below.

Memorandum of Understanding ISTI-CNR Nubisware
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Nubisware strengthens its R&D attitude thanks to ISTI-CNR partnership
Nubisware strengthens its R&D attitude thanks to ISTI-CNR partnership 1920 1280 Nubisware

Nubisware is proud to announce the signature of a Memorandum of Understanding related to a long term partnership with the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione “A. Faedo” (ISTI) del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR).

By this act Nubisware confirms its attitude towards research and development through a partner of excellence.

In synergy with ISTI-CNR staff we’ll handle topoics like Collaborative Working, Open Science, Open Scholarship working on the platforms GCube, D4Science, and OpenAIRE.

Nubisware team will contribute with its strong technological and innovation competences in IT areas such as workflow management, microservice architectures, system integration, interoperability and data analysis.

Stay tuned!

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Chip a gem out of the monolith
Chip a gem out of the monolith 1000 1000 Nubisware

Leave all that can be spared behind. We travel light. Let’s hunt some orc. ― Aragorn, The Lord of the Rings

David’s success depended on surprise and accuracy. He knew he could not defeat Goliath on the giant’s terms, which is why he rejected Saul’s armor and with it the conventions of this form of combat. ― Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History

How an illuminated customer, carefully planned design decisions and a well chosen bunch of tools turned one of Nubisware’s most challenging commitments into a success story.

Late 2017 we’ve started to work at a very ambitious project for a large logistics company which had to face a complex refactoring of one of its core business applications.
The application had been built with an approach that at the time was considered traditional. A huge, web-based monolith rooted on top of a relational database.
Only very few technicians knowing what was going on under the hood and what were the design choices that led to particular solutions.
Up to when the supplier discontinued support, the application performed well enough. With the exception of a particular functional segment which had been causing headaches for years.
Our customer’s IT responsible was a very clever guy with a huge domain specific knowledge and a solid background in computer science. He was definitely tired of all the complaints raised by colleagues and customers so he asked the company’s CEO to invest in a refactoring of the indicted functionality. And that’s where Nubisware comes into play.

It must be said that, the functionality we were asked to refactor is a rather complex part of an already complex domain like logistics. The border between a rule and an exception is rather blurred. Thus, the work required a very careful analysis and planning which involved several meetings and a cyclic reworking of the project’s documentation.
Besides the inherent difficulty, the application also suffered from erroneous design choices that caused a general inflexibility making it very hard to correct weaknesses and limitations.
Relational persistence and the object-oriented data model proved to be major logical bottlenecks. We decided to go with a more data driven approach and helped the customer understand why a document oriented representation of the domain rules was better suited in this case.

From an architectural viewpoint the application was bulky, slow and to some extent unmanageable. We decided to rewrite the code as a set of cooperating microservices which are mostly stateless and thus perfectly suited to exploit inherent parallelism available on the customer’s very good infrastructure. Moreover, it enabled for a progressive migration towards the final solution involving several small and risk-limited integration steps.
Every major functionality (the algorithmic core, the data transformation services, the document repository, the graphical user interface) was split apart, wrapped with a REST API, rethought, rewritten, intensively tested and then put into staging. This was so surprisingly smooth that, to my feelings there has not even been an official staging-to-production phase. At some point have been told that users were using the new functionality with great satisfaction.
The serialization model for the documents was chosen to be XML because its formal solidity and the availability of validation and modeling tools granted the robustness that was needed for the backbone of the project. JSON was limited to the interaction between the User Agent, the GUI and some supporting services that provided integration to existing databases. The use cases were very heterogeneous but we wanted to keep the syntax (i. e. XSD) simple and manageable manually. Thus we decided to go for a very simple yet flexible XML structure with the possibility to enrich the semantics of elements through RDFa.
In order to manage the complexity and the continuously evolving specifications we decided to model all the application semantics (rules, constraints, relations, mappings, …) with an OWL Ontology designed with Protegé. Keeping most of the domain specific logic stored in an external, lightweight yet structured model allowed for late refactorings and enhancements to the application logic and proved to be also a great support for the implementation of the GUI.
All the code was written in XQuery 3.1 modules and BaseX was used as the runtime for the scripts and the REST APIs. The seven services were packaged into WAR archives (each less than 20MBs in size) and deployed inside Tomcat (7, 8, and 9).

In conclusion, the services have been running, nearly without intervention, for about 9 months by now. The customer is very satisfied about the huge improvements in flexibility and performance and, besides all the other metrics that we’ve taken (footprint, memory usage, throughput, …), this is the only actual one that counts at the end!

Nubisware e MoDiS su Il Sole 24 Ore
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Nubisware on Il Sole 24 Ore
Nubisware on Il Sole 24 Ore 1080 1080 Nubisware

Nubisware invites you to read the brief article on page 26 of today’s (July 26th, 2018) Il Sole 24 Ore.
The article talks about MoDiS, a technological advanced product for remote industrial diagnostics developed in collaboration with GS&S.

BaseX
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Nubisware sponsors BaseX
Nubisware sponsors BaseX 1499 905 Nubisware

The reward for work well done, is the opportunity to do more. – Jonas Salk –

No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave. – Calvin Coolidge –

In order to explain in few words what BaseX is, I’d just cite the incipit of it’s home on the web which I warmly encourage you to have a look at.

BaseX is a robust, high-performance XML database engine and a highly compliant XQuery 3.1 processor with full support of the W3C Update and Full Text extensions. It serves as excellent framework for building complex data-intensive web applications. 
It comes with interactive user interfaces (desktop, web-based) that give you great insight into your data.

For us it has grown over the years to become an invaluable “swiss army knife” that we use pervasively to implement all sort of components for our customers’ micro-services, REST APIs, data-oriented applications and integrations. Not to speak of Nubisware’s own internal tooling and artifacts.

Great! At what cost comes all this power? Actually at no cost! Thanks to BaseX Gmbh, BaseX is usable for free with a very permissive opensource License.

For more than ten years, as employees of different companies, we’ve been very active BaseX users and we contributed to it with suggestions and code snippets, participating in the mailing list and even presenting our work at one BaseX users’ meetup in the context of XMLPrague (2015).

Today, joined into Nubisware, we are exited to announce that we are able to contribute back with a concrete sponsorship for the development of one awesome feature in the upcoming 9.x series that will even more boost our productivity and enhance the solutions we are developing for our most valuable partners and customers.

We are really looking forward to further collaborate with the wonderful staff at BaseX Gmbh!

egdsimulator
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EGD Simulator to the rescue
EGD Simulator to the rescue 930 768 Nubisware

Learning never exhausts the mind. – Leonardo da Vinci –

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way. – Napoleon Hill –

In its nearly two years of life, Nubisware has already gone along different more or less successful paths.

One of the journeys that has taught us very interesting lessons is the one we followed side by side with our partner GS&S in the development of MoDiS a Monitoring and Diagnostic Software for the industrial domain.

The industrial domain is a rather consolidated one that has its long lived rules, practices, tools and protocols.

Sometimes it has been though for computer scientists devoted to opensource, as we are, to understand what is the correct tooling and where to find opensource libraries and instrumentation that allows for connecting and testing hardware devices which are not commonly available off the shelf.

One such hardware components, we have been asked to interface to by our partner, is the MarK VIe device by GE Automation. Thanks to the great support of GS&S, we have been able to interact with a Mark VIe CPU in their laboratories from time to time. Most importantly we got some example exports of likely industrial plant configurations.

Once we’ve dug deeply enough into the details of the GE-EGD protocol, which is the most efficient way to communicate with the Mark VIe device, we decided that implementing a software simulator for a GE-EGD source could be feasible. This tool would allow us to continuously test and optimize our GE-EGD consumer software without depending on the availability of a real device.

Today, Nubisware in agreement with GS&S, felt that it would be great to release our EGDSimulator on GitHub for the open source community with the hope to help out other developers, engineers or students the same way we have got support from domain experts who preceded us and who released software which is of great help and inspiration such as PyVisa, PyVisaPy, Eclipse MILO, Coolprop.

Happy simulation!

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