Web Dashboard

Important

This page documents the old(though still current) web dashboard, also known as JSON_Bourne. The new one should have its architecture and how it’s run explained in the README of its repository.

The dataweb service allows some information about each instrument to be viewed in a webpage from both inside and outside the ISIS network. This service already exists for SECI instruments.

The Overall Architecture

Architecture

The dataweb system consists of a number of parts running on each instrument:

The Archive Engine

The archive engine shown in the high level design produces internal webpages that provides live data on various PVs in HTML format:

The WebServer

The webserver is run as part of the BlockServer and provides all of the data on the current configuration in JSON format. This is the exact same data that is served on the GET_CURR_CONFIG_DETAILS PV. The webserver is currently serving the data on localhost:8008. Note that the fortinet VPN uses 8008 for internal configuration and so you cannot access this address through the fortinet VPN.

On the Dataweb Server

There are also parts of the system running on a central webserver, which provides external access.

JSON Bourne

The program collates all the data from the other sources, on all the EPICS instruments, such as putting the blocks and their values into the relevant groups as given by the configuration. This information is served as JSON to localhost:60000. This runs as a service on the central server and lives in C:\JSON_Bourne.

The Website

Currently a simple JS script takes the JSON created by JSON Bourne and provides a simple webpage for an external client to view. This can be accessed from http://dataweb.isis.rl.ac.uk/. The code for the website, both the html and javascript are located in the central server at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\DataWeb\IbexDataweb.

Grafana and Journals Setup

Docs can be found on the shares at shares\isis_experiment_controls\web_dashboard_history.docx

Deployment

To update the production version of the dashboard:

Development/Testing

Clone the repository at https://github.com/ISISComputingGroup/JSON_bourne

To test the blockserver webserver:

  • Start your instrument

  • Navigate to localhost:8008 in a browser

To test JSON_Bourne:

To test the front end on a developer machine:

  • Open default.html with the variable of ?Instrument=instrument-name e.g. go to file:///C:/Instrument/Dev/JSON_bourne/front_end/default.html?Instrument=larmor in a browser to view Larmor’s dashboard. Note that the path is dependant on where you have created the local JSON_bourne repository. This will use the JSON bourne instance running on NDAEXTWEB!

To test the front end and JSON bourne on a developer machine:

To be able to see your instrument as well:

  • Add your instrument to the local_inst_list dictionary in the webserver.py e.g. local_inst_list = {"LOCALHOST": ("localhost")}

  • Run your instrument

  • Run JSON Bourne up as above

If you need to update the archive engine then you will need to:

  1. Run create_icp_binaries.bat

  2. make clean uninstall install in ..\EPICS\CSS\master

Troubleshooting

General Investigation

First look at the log to ensure that there are no issues. The log is held in C:\JSON_Bourne\log. Issues may be in the front end, in which case error logs are in the web browser, visit the webpage in a browser and open up the web console. If there are a number of HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable errors, restarting the server completely may be required, but simply restarting the Dataweb should be the first thing to try.

Restart the Dataweb

As admin open the “Task Scheduler” (there is a shortcut for this on the desktop) and end and run the “JSON Bourne” task (in task scheduler library). Make sure that ending the task has killed the Python webserver process.

New Instrument with No Details

If the instrument archive has never been restarted then the dataweb will fail to show any information and claim that the server hasn’t been started. To fix this simple restart the instrument archive.

Instrument Page not Working on Web Dashboard

Several causes

  1. Check that the instrument is in the list of Instruments in https://github.com/ISISComputingGroup/JSON_bourne/blob/master/webserver.py and that the version on web server is up-to-date.

  2. Issues with MySQL in the moment the IBEX server was started (this seems to affect the archiver start up). Check logs of the MySQL service in the var area, fix any issues so that MySQL is running correctly again, then restart the IBEX server.

  3. If it works in your browser but not he users they may have a old cached copy (this shouldn’t happen but we have seen it in Safari). Clear their browser cache and reload.

  4. Try restarting ARINST on the instrument. It can happen that the archiver does not pick up all PVs to be archived on server startup. A symptom of this is that the configuration file under EPICS\CSS\master\ArchiveEngine\inst_config.xml is very short compared to other machines.

Future Development Ideas

  • We need to improve the unit test coverage of this project. It would be worth looking into the requests-mock library as this would make it very easy to test server code which makes HTTP requests.

Overview page

http://dataweb.isis.rl.ac.uk/IbexDataweb/Overview/ibexOverview.html