Chronos

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Visit our website at chronoslany.com.

Chronos is a comprehensive developer tool that monitors the health and web traffic for containerized (Docker & Kubernetes) and non-containerized microservices communicated via REST APIs or gRPC, whether hosted locally or on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Use Chronos to see real-time data monitoring and receive automated notifications over Slack or email.

What's New?

Chronos 14.0

Contributors: Michael Tagg, Ted Pham, Sofia Sarhiri, Stephen Yang,

Updates:

Implemented a new visualization button (example) to expedite data rendering processes.

Refactored microservices example, switched over to community version of MongoDB for easier URI implementation.

Modularized cluttered components into modular units to improve code readability and reusability.

Optimized startup scripts to reduce application load time and streamline environment configuration.

Upgraded Material-UI from version 4 to version 5, adapting to new API changes and improving UI responsiveness.

Refactored portions of the electron app

Refactored data parsing logic to reduce unnecessary rerenders and improve app performance

Fixed data bottle necks in the local npm packages, data is now able to flow to microservices for data visualization

Version 14.0 Medium Article

Iteration Log

Chronos 13.0

Contributors: Elsa Holmgren, Mckenzie Morris, Kelly Chandler, Sean Simpson, Zhongyan Liang

Created new and improved microservices application with updated syntax to better demonstrate Chronos' capabilities
Dockerized microservices application to demonstrate Chronos within a containerized environment
Added visulization of Chronos' codebase to illustrate overall structure
Simplified installation and startup instructions in the root directory README file
Improved documentation in chronos_npm_package README file for easier on-boarding

Version 13.0 Medium Article

Chronos 12.0

Contributors: Haoyu Liu, Edwin Leong, Eisha Kaushal, Tyler Coryell

Grafana charting and visualizer
Increase in Prometheus and cAdvisor integration span
Increased testing coverage to include unit testing and Selenium-based, end-to-end testing
Integrated CI/CD which automates GitHub Action to run testing suites in order and create a publishing action to NPM Registry

Version 12.0 Medium Article

Chronos 11.0

Contributors: Brisa Zhu, Lucie Seidler, Justin Poirier, Jeffrey Na, Kelsi Webb

Interactive charting which can display and compare metrics in rendered graphs
Increased user database security with user authorization to connect multiple
services and databases and have instances persist without having to reconnect
Improved documentation by adding ReadMes about how to initialize the app, how to use the given examples, and how to update config files
Updated NPM Package to ‘increase reliability and ease of navigation
Fixed bugs and improved test coverage

Version 11.0 Medium Article

Chronos 10.0

Contributors: Brian Lim, Claire Tischuk, Lennon Stewart, Victor Ye,

Full user authentication integrating with a functional database which enables users to securely save their profile and data
Updated microservices, gRPC, and Dockerized app examples

Version 10.0 Medium Article

Chronos 9.0

Contributors: Brian Lim, Claire Tischuk, Lennon Stewart, Victor Ye

Added AWS - Users of Chronos are now able to monitor and visualize containers running in Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)~Medium
Ability to monitor cost metrics through Opencast integration

Version 9.0 Medium Article

Chronos 8.0

Contributors: Vince Ho, Matt Giant, Derek Lam, Kit Loong Yee

Rewrite microservice in a language with a higher level of support such as GO or Java
Use packages such as OpenTelementry to record data and export said data to an additional application like Zipkin or Prometheus
Purchase a license to one of the few monitoring tools that support gRPC and Node.js.

Version 8.0 Medium Article

Chronos 7.0

Contributors: Yang Song, Giovanni Floreslovo, James Edwards, Alex Kolb

Ability to filter out specific metrics using a query tool
Increased the number of metrics available from 12 to 100+
Options to filter metrics by category
Apache Kafka monitoring capabilities
Bug fixes and UI improvements

Version 7.0 Medium Article

With Chronos 14.0

Overview of the CodeBase

If you want to visualize the way the files in the app are connected, we suggest using this data visualizer. Below, it's showing the same repository, but instead of a directory structure, each file and folder as a circle: the circle’s color is the type of file, and the circle’s size represents the size of the file. See live demo here.

Features

Cloud-Based Instances:
- Option to choose between cloud hosted services and local services, giving Chronos the ability to monitor instances and clusters on AWS EC2, ECS, and EKS platforms
Local instances utilitizing @chronosmicro/tracker NPM package:
- Enables distributed tracing enabled across microservices applications
- Displays real-time temperature, speed, latency, and memory statistics for local services
- Displays and compares multiple microservice metrics in a single graph
- Allow Kubernetes and Docker monitoring via Prometheus server and Grafana visualization.
- Compatible with
- Monitor an cluster via the JMX Prometheus Exporter
- Supports and databases

Installation

This is for the latest Chronos version 13.0 release.

NPM Package

In order to use Chronos within your own application, you must have the @chronosmicro/tracker dependency installed.

The @chronosmicro/tracker package tracks your application's calls and scrapes metrics from your system.

NOTE: The Chronos tracker code is included in the chronos_npm_package folder for ease of development, but the published NPM package can be downloaded by running npm install @chronosmicro/tracker.

For more details on the NPM package and instructions for how to use it, please view the Chronos NPM Package README.

Chronos Desktop Application

Running the Chronos desktop app in development mode (WSL Incompatible)

From the root directory, run npm install
Run npm run start:electron to start the electron app.
Run npm audit fix or npm audit fix --force if prompted
Refer to Examples sections below to spin up example applications. (Recommended): If you have mongo community edition running locally just run npm run start:microservices to start populating database with server data(more detail in Microservices Example section).

Packing the Chronos desktop app into an executable

From the root directory, run npm run build
Run npm run package
Find the chronos.app executable inside the newly created release-builds folder in the root directory.

Creating User Database

NOTE: You must create your own user database for extended features

Create a MongoDB database in which to store user information and insert it on line 2 within the UserModel.ts (electron/models/UserModel.ts) file.
- This database will privately store user information.
Once this is set up, you can create new users, log in, and have your data persist between sessions.

Examples

We provide eight example applications for you to test out both the Chronos NPM package and the Chronos desktop application:

Additional documentation on how Chronos is used in each example can be found in the Chronos NPM Package README.

AWS

The AWS folder includes 3 example applications with instructions on how to deploy them in AWS platforms. Note that using AWS services may cause charges.

The ECS folder includes an web application ready to be containerized using Docker. The instruction shows how to deploy application to ECS using Docker CLI command, and it will be managed by Fargate services.
The EC2 folder includes a React/Redux/SQL web application ready to be containerized using Docker. The instruction shows how to deploy application using AWS Beanstalk and connect application to RDS database. Beanstalk service will generate EC2 instance.
The EKS folder includes a containerized note taking app that uses a Mongo database as its persistent volume. The instructions show how to deploy this application on EKS, how to monitor with Prometheus & Opencost, and how to use Grafana to grab visualizations.

Refer to the EC2 README, ECS README, and EKS README example in the AWS folder for more details.

Docker

In the folder within the master branch, we provide a sample dockerized microservices application to test out Chronos and to apply distributed tracing across different containers for your testing convenience.

The docker folder includes individual files in their respective directories. A docker-compose.yml is in the root directory in case you'd like to deploy all services together.

Refer to the Docker README in the docker folder for more details.

gRPC

The gRPC folder includes an HTML frontend and an Express server backend, as well as proto files necessary to build package definitions and make gRPC calls. The reverse_proxy folder contains the server that requires in the clients, which contain methods and services defined by proto files.

Refer to the gRPC README in the gRPC folder for more details.

Kubernetes

The kubernetes folder includes a React frontend and an Express server backend, and the Dockerfiles needed to containerize them for Kubernetes deployment. The launch folder includes the YAML files needed to configure the deployments, services, and configurations of the frontend, backend, Prometheus server, and Grafana.

Refer to the Kubernetes README in the kubernetes folder for more details.

Microservices

In the microservices folder, we provide a sample microservice application that successfully utilizes Chronos to apply all the powerful, built-in features of our monitoring tool. You can then visualize the data with the app.

Refer to the microservices README in the microservices folder for more details.

Testing

We've created testing suites for Chronos with React Testing, Jest, and Selenium for unit, integration, and end-to-end tests - instructions on running them can be found in the testing README.

Contributing

Development of Chronos is open source on GitHub through the tech accelerator OS Labs, and we are grateful to the community for contributing bug fixes and improvements.

Read our contributing README to learn how you can take part in improving Chronos.