how to read MQTT mosquitto server persisted DB file - format

I am using mosquitto server for MQTT protocol.
Using persistence setting in a configuration file with -c option, I am able to save the data.
However the file generated is binary one.
How would one be able to read that file?
Is there any specific tool available for that?
Appreciate your views.
Thanks!
Amit

Why do you want to read it?
The data is only kept there while messages (QOS1 or QOS2) are in flight to ensure they are not lost in transit while waiting for a response from the subscribed client.
Data may also be kept for clients that are disconnected but have persistent subscriptions (cleanSession=false) until that client reconnects.
If you are looking to persist all messages for later consumption you will have to write a client to subscribe and store this data in a DB of your choosing. One possible option to do this quickly and simply is Node-RED, but there are others and some brokers even have plugins for this e.g. HiveMQ.
If you really want to read it then you will probably have to write your own tool to do this based on the Mosquitto src code

Related

Read data directly from REST Api with Kafka

Is such a situation even possible ? :
There is an application "XYZ" (in which there is no Kafka) that exposes a REST api. It is a SpringBoot application with which Angular application communicates.
A new application (SpringBoot) is created which wants to use Kafka and needs to fetch data from "XYZ" application. And it wants to do this using Kafka.
The "XYZ" application has an example endpoint [GET] api/message/all which displays all messages.
Is there a way to "connect" Kafka directly to this endpoint and read data from it ? In short, the idea is for Kafka to consume data directly from the EP. Communication between two microservices, where one microservice does not have a kafka.
What suggestions do you have for solving this situation. Because I guess this option is not possible. Is it necessary to add a publisher in application XYZ which will send data to the queue and only then will they be available for consumption by a new application ??
Getting them via the REST-Interface might not be a very good idea.
Simply put, in the messaging world, message delivery guarantees are a big topic and the standard ways to solve that with Kafka are usually
Producing messages from your service using the Producer-API to a Kafka topic.
Using Kafka-Connect to read from an outbox-table.
Since you most likely have a database already attached to your API-Service, there might arise the problem of dual writes if you choose to produce the messages directly to a topic. What this means, is that writes to a database might fail while it might be successfully written to Kafka/vice-versa. So you can end up with inconsistent states. Depending on your use case this might be a problem or not.
Nevertheless, to overcome that, the outbox pattern can come in handy.
Via the outbox pattern, you'd basically write your messages to a table, a so-called outbox-table, and then you'd use Kafka-Connect to poll this table of the database. Kafka Connect is basically a cluster of workers that consume this database table and forward the entries of the table to a Kafka topic. You might want to look at confluent cloud, they offer a fully managed Kafka-Connect service. Like this you don't have to manage the cluster of workers yourself. Once you have the messages in a Kafka topic, you can consume them with the standard Kafka Consumer-API/ Stream-API.
What you're looking for is a Source-Connector.
A source connector for a specific database. E.g. MongoDB
E.g. https://www.confluent.io/hub/mongodb/kafka-connect-mongodb
For now, most source-connectors produce in an at-least-once fashion. This means that the topic you configure the connector to write to might contain a message twice. So make sure that if you need them to be consumed exactly once, you think about deduplicating these messages.

Microservice failure Scenario

I am working on Microservice architecture. One of my service is exposed to source system which is used to post the data. This microservice published the data to redis. I am using redis pub/sub. Which is further consumed by couple of microservices.
Now if the other microservice is down and not able to process the data from redis pub/sub than I have to retry with the published data when microservice comes up. Source can not push the data again. As source can not repush the data and manual intervention is not possible so I tohught of 3 approaches.
Additionally Using redis data for storing and retrieving.
Using database for storing before publishing. I have many source and target microservices which use redis pub/sub. Now If I use this approach everytime i have to insert the request in DB first than its response status. Now I have to use shared database, this approach itself adding couple of more exception handling cases and doesnt look very efficient to me.
Use kafka inplace if redis pub/sub. As traffic is low so I used Redis pub/sub and not feasible to change.
In both of the above cases, I have to use scheduler and I have a duration before which I have to retry else subsequent request will fail.
Is there any other way to handle above cases.
For the point 2,
- Store the data in DB.
- Create a daemon process which will process the data from the table.
- This Daemon process can be configured well as per our needs.
- Daemon process will poll the DB and publish the data, if any. Also, it will delete the data once published.
Not in micro service architecture, But I have seen this approach working efficiently while communicating 3rd party services.
At the very outset, as you mentioned, we do indeed seem to have only three possibilities
This is one of those situations where you want to get a handshake from the service after pushing and after processing. In order to accomplish the same, using a middleware queuing system would be a right shot.
Although a bit more complex to accomplish, what you can do is use Kafka for streaming this. Configuring producer and consumer groups properly can help you do the job smoothly.
Using a DB to store would be a overkill, considering the situation where you "this data is to be processed and to be persisted"
BUT, alternatively, storing data to Redis and reading it in a cron-job/scheduled job would make your job much simpler. Once the job is run successfully, you may remove the data from cache and thus save Redis Memory.
If you can comment further more on the architecture and the implementation, I can go ahead and update my answer accordingly. :)

Exchange files (up to many GB)

For my project, I have to create a file manager which aims at storing many files (from many locations) and exposing URL to download them.
In a micro-service ecosystem (I am used to use spring boot), I wonder what is the best way to exchange such files, I mean sending files to file manager?
On a one hand, I always thought it is better to exchange them asynchronously, so HTTP does not seem a good choice. But maybe I am wrong.
Is it a good choice to split files into fragments (in order to reduce number of bytes for each part) and send each of them through something like RabbitMQ or Kafka? Or should I rather transfer entire files on a NAS or through FTP and let file manager handling them? Or something else, like for example storing bytes in a temp database (maybe not a good choice)...
The problem of fragmentation is I have to implement a logic for keeping sort of each fragments which complicates processing of queues of topics.
IMO, never send actual files through a message broker.
First, setup some object storage system, for example S3 (with AWS or locally with Ceph), then send the path to the file as a string with the producer, then have the consumer read that path, and download the file.
If you want to collect files off of NAS or FTP, then Apache NiFi is one tool that has connectors to systems like that.
Based on my professional experience working with distributed systems (JMS based), to transfer huge content between participants:
a fragment approach should be used for request - reply model + control signals (has next, fragment counter)
delta approach for updates.
To avoid corrupt data, a hash function result can also be transmitted and checked in both scenarios.
But as mentioned in this e-mail thread, a better approach is to use FTP for this kind of scenarios:
RabbitMQ should actually not be used for big file transfers or only
with great care and fragmenting the files into smaller separate
messages.
When running a single broker instance, you'd still be safe, but in a
clustered setup, very big messages will break the cluster.
Clustered nodes are connected via 1 tcp connection, which must also
transport a (erlang) heartbeat. If your big message takes more time to
transfer between nodes than the heartbeat timeout (anywhere between
~20-45 seconds if I'm correct), the cluster will break and your
message is lost.
The preferred architecture for file transfer over amqp is to just send
a message with a link to a downloadable resource and let the file
transfer be handle by specialized protocol like ftp :-)
Hope it helps.

Spring boot applications high availability

We have a microservice which is developed using spring boot. couple of the functionalities it implements is
1) A scheduler that triggers, at a specified time, a file download using webhdfs and process it and once the data is processed, it will send an email to users with the data process summary.
2) Read messages from kafka and once the data is read, send an email to users.
We are now planning to make this application high available either in Active-Active or Active-passive set up. The problem we are facing now is if both the instances of the application are running then both of them will try to download the file/read the data from kafka, process it and send emails. How can this be avoided? I mean to ensure that only one instance triggers the download and process it ?
Please let me know if there is known solution for this kind of scenarios as this seems to be a common scenario in most of the projects? Is master-slave/leader election approach a correct solution?
Thanks
Let the service download that file, extract the information and publish them via kafka.
Check beforehand if the information was already processed by querying kafka or a local DB.
You also could publish an DataProcessed-Event that triggers the EmailService, that sends the corresponding E-Mail.

How to get importing progress and error log when importing data from kafka to elasticsearch?

Background:
I'm trying to import data from kafka to elasticsearch, and there are 2 kinds of clients. One is web client, another one is agent client.
Web client will handle csv file when user upload, web client reads every 10,000 rows from csv file and send the data message with the csv total lines count to Producer. Producer send the message to kafka, then consumer pulls the message, and imports data into elasticsearch. At the same time consumer uses the data messages length and csv total count to update task progress, also updates error logs if it has. At last our web client would know the errors and importing progress.
Agent client watch log file changes, once the new log is coming, it would send message to producer, the same as web client, but it does not care about progress. As the logs is always growing like nginx logs.
Framework:
Here is the framework that I used:
The producer and consumer are our python programs that used kafka-python.
Problems:
Sometimes the consumer crashed, it would been auto restart and
reimported the same data again.
Sometime client send too many
messages, Producer might miss some, as the http request has
limitation I guess.
Question:
Is there any better framework to do those thing? like using kafka-connect-elasticsearch , spark streaming ?
Yes - use the Kafka Connect Elasticsearch connector. This will make your life a LOT easier. The Kafka Connect API is specifically designed to do all of this hard stuff for you (restarts, offset management, etc). As an end-user you just need to set up a configuration file. You can read an example of using Kafka Connect here.
Kafka Connect is part of Apache Kafka. The Elasticsearch connector is open source and available on its own on github. Alternatively, just download Confluent Platform which bundles the latest version of Kafka with connectors (including Elasticsearch, HDFS, etc) and a bunch of other useful tools.

Resources