Skylight Roadrunner

Introducing Roadrunner

Roadrunner is data collector for the Skylight solution. It can receive or poll Accedian sensors or 3rd party sources for time series performance monitoring data, perform transformations and upload the data to Skylight analytics.

Modes of operation

A roadrunner instance can run in a few different modes. The primary modes are:

1. Filewatcher
   • Processes watch a directory for CSV files, parses and uploads them
   • This is the method used for collection of most embedded sensors
2. Openmetric Gateway
   • Sensor agents and Flex can securely connect to Roadrunner and stream Openmetric PM data
   • Roadrunner will cache and proxy to analytics
3. Openmetrics Scraper
   • polls an external data source at a defined interval, transforms data and uploads to analytics
   • can be used with many open source Openmetric exporter (i.e. snmp-exporter)
   • requires Accedian Professional Services to enable
4. SNMP alert forwarder
   • If you want to convert analytics threshold alerts into SNMP events, Roadrunner can be configured to listen for alerts, convert them to SNMP traps and forward them to a given destination
   • More information on this can be found here - How to Provision RoadRunner to Support SNMP

More about configuration Roadrunners settings are talked about here:

• Connector Configuration

Roadrunner and Sensors

Relationship to Skylight Sensor: agents

Roadrunner can act as both the data and managment gateway for agents.

• Data gateway - collecting OpenMetric PM data from agents and securely transfering to analytics
• Management gateway - proxying agent configuration, status and commands between agents and their orchestration services running centrally on the Skylight platform.

Relationship to Skylight Flex

Roadrunner collects streaming telemetry from Flex devices in the same manner as it does for agents.
There is an template available for Flex when setting up your connector configuration:

Roadrunner can also be deployed in "standalone" mode when operators want to send Flex data to locations other than Skylight analytics.

For more information on:

• Deploying a Standalone Roadrunner
• How to configure Flex to stream data to Roadrunner check out the PM Telemetry

Relationship to Skylight Sensor: capture

The sensor: capture VM image contains an embedded Roadrunner for data transfer to Analytics. An connector configuration will be automatically created with the sensor phone's home to register.

For more information on How to register a Skylight sensor: capture with analytics.

Where it gets deployed

• Roadrunner's should run close to where the PM data is getting generated.
• If analytics is centrally or cloud hosted, the Roadrunners can be deployed in each datacenter, cloud provider location, branch location.
• Roadrunner will then connect and transfer the collect PM data back to analytics.

Roadrunner is a container based solution that can be deployed directly as via docker or in a Kubernetes environment via Helm.

More on:

• Deploying Roadrunner in Docker
• Deploying with Kubernetes and Helm

Cool features

Filtering Session Data

Allow and block lists can be provisioned to control had collected data makes its way back to analytics. Check out Roadrunner Session Filter for more information on this capability.

Data Security

• Roadrunner only requires outbound connectivity, meaning Analytics will never try to connect into the network where roadrunner is deployed.
• Data transfer between Roadrunner and Analytics is bi-directional once that outbound connection is established
• Data is encrypted in transit to Skylight analytics over HTTPS / TLS with mutual certificate authentication - AES-256 cipher with SHA-384
• Outbound connectivity can be through the customers web proxy when reaching out to an Accedian or cloud hosted analytics.

Data Resilency

Data parsed, polled or streamed to Roadrunner is cached in case of connectivity issues back to Analytics. The cache can typically survive at between 4 to 24 hours, but is highly dependent on the amount of data being collected and transfered.
When connectivity to analytics is restored, the cache will be shipped.