Non-google Summer of Code proposal: Distributed monitoring of the Jabber network

(This was initially a Google SoC project proposal. Someone got a grant to work on this, but then, he got another grant to work on another project, and he chose to work on the other one…)

The Jabber network isn’t really known for its reliability: servers are often down, or are unable to contact other servers. And most server admins don’t have tools to detect such problems. There’s some data on http://public.jabbernet.dk/mrtg/, but it’s far from being enough.

The goal of this project is to build a testing framework to be able to monitor the public servers and answer those questions :

  • Do client connections using SASL, TLS or SSL currently work on server foo.com ? (not only checking if the TCP port is open, but do full login)
  • Do server-to-server communications works between server foo.com and bar.com ? What about latency ? (To determine that, you need to connect to both servers and exchange ping messages)

Of course one would need a nice way to vizualize such data (matrix + rrdtool graphs ?)

Additional ideas :

  • Allow server admins to set a contact email, so they can be informed of problems (and/or provide an RSS feed)
  • Integrate this into the XMPP Federation

I would like to work on this, but I won’t have time. If you are interested, please contact me !

4 thoughts on “Non-google Summer of Code proposal: Distributed monitoring of the Jabber network

  1. I am interested too. I was starting something like this last oktober, at first only checking for open ports. But personal life prevented me to work very actively.

    I was planning to use the upwatch system ( developer.berlios.de/proj… ), I am one of the two developers currently, but there are first other things that need to be done before I will start at the jabber probe daemons.

    I wish I was still a student :-)

  2. As I told Lucas, I’m interested in this project and I hope I can contribute to it in the near future. My JID is wed at im.apinc.org

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