Getting started

Hemdal is a library designed to run commands and retrieve a result. It let us implement the different aspects of the system as we want and it's extensible enough to provide us ways of implementing extensions without modifying the core code base.

Hemdal isn't a stand-alone system, if you need that kind of service, check Hemdal UI which implements Hemdal User Interface with Phoenix Framework and Trooper for providing more features and a stand-alone way to run Hemdal.

Understanding the layers

You need to understand the elements of Hemdal to know how to use it and extend it. The layers are:

• Hemdal.Host is the way Hemdal connects with the hosts to run commands. It's an implementation of a pool of hosts defined by the maximum number of tasks that could be running at the same time on the same host.
• Hemdal.Check is the state of each alarm/alert of the system. It's a state machine that is running in a defined interval of time a command against a host. Depending on the result it's generating information and changes its state.
• Hemdal.Event is the event generator, each time the state machine (Hemdal.Check) generates an event, it goes to this module and it's sent to all of its consumers. It's based on GenStage and you can create as many consumers as you need.
• Hemdal.Notifier is a specific consumer for Hemdal.Event which has the mission to report the events to specific endpoints. You can implement new modules to provide new ways of notification.

These are the basic ways we can provide for extending the system.

Hosts

At the moment, to connect to different hosts, we provide only one way, but because SSH is a bit more complicated, we created a new repository to show you how to extend Hemdal in a non-intrusive way to implement your stuff:

• Hemdal.Host.Local is running commands using System.shell/2, it's not too fancy but it's useful.
• Hemdal.Host.Trooper is a way to implement SSH to connect to remote hosts.

See Hemdal.Config.Host to know how to configure and use them.

Events

While there are different examples that you can see in the source code, it's easier to think about the events as a simple GenStage consumer. You can write your own, put it under your supervisor and consume it from Hemdal.Event. You will receive always the %Hemdal.Event{} structure.

We have the implementation of the following event consumers:

• Hemdal.Event.Log which is triggering a log for each event received.
• Hemdal.Event.Notification which is converting the event into a notification for the notifier.
• Hemdal.Event.Mock which is in use for test purposes.

Notifiers

The notifiers are defined in the alert configuration (see Hemdal.Config.Alert). You can specify a list of notifiers to be in use every time a new event is triggering a notification.

We have defined the following notifiers:

• Hemdal.Notifier.Slack which is triggering a message for the Slack system.
• Hemdal.Notifier.Mattermost which is triggering a message for the Mattermost system.
• Hemdal.Notifier.Mock which is for testing purposes.