The ISIS framework is build up of four essential parts: Agents, Central Servers, smbtop command line utilities and Managers (see figure below). Communication between them takes place by means of Java RMI technology. Each of these components is dedicated to a certain specific task. Agents run as background processes, which gather raw measurement data from the Samba servers they are installed on. These data are requested periodically by Central Servers or smbtop tools. Whereas smbtop only displays current data from a single Agent, a Central Server is capable of interacting with an arbitrary number of Agents and storing a large amount of historical measurement data from each one of them. Additionally, Central Servers allow for introduction of specialized data analysis and evaluation techniques by means of so called custom analysis rules – CARs. Finally, Managers are used for visualizing data gathered from a Central Server in a comprehensive yet easily understandable way. They also carry out any Central Server management tasks, such as configuration of Agents, CARs or user accounts and permissions.
Components of the ISIS platform
As almost everything within the ISIS platform is implemented in Java, some of the components like Central Server and Manager are platform independent. However, due to native dependancies Agents are currently restricted to the Solaris operating system, version 8 and above. A Linux port is currently under development and will be delivered soon. Also, the smbtop command line utility is available solely for Solaris and Linux due to dependencies on the native terminal control library curses or its free variant GNU ncurses, respectively.
