Writing advanced adapters

After understanding Khika Data Format and going through the initial exercise of Writing you own KHIKA Data Adapters , it is the time to create a production level KHIKA Adapter. A few points to note here before we begin writing our own Adapter:

• Adapters are scripts that execute on KHIKA Data Aggregator
• Adapters can be written in any programming language (our favorite is python 2.7)
• Adapters are scheduled processes and KHIKA Data Aggregator is responsible for scheduling them to run at a periodic interval (typically 1 minute to 5 minutes)
• The Adapter scripts
  • read the raw log messages one-by-one (from source such as files, queues, APIs, Databases etc),
  • parse the log messages,
  • convert it in Khika Data Format
  • Write the output to stdout
• KHIKA Data Aggregator pipes the output of the Aggregator script and send it to KHIKA over a SSL connection

With these concepts in mind, let proceed with an example of a production ready KHIKA Data Adapter. Login to your KHIKA Data Aggregator node (default username/password is khika/khika123). We will study a syslog based adapter that processes the messages received from a PaloAlto Firewall. Open file TLHook_Adaptor_PaloAlto.py from directory /opt/KHIKA/Apps/Adapters/PaloAltoFW.

Check first few lines of this file where we import some important python modules

     1 #!/bin/env python
     2 import os, sys
     3 import socket
     4 import csv,StringIO
     5 import logging #The logging libraries
     6 import re #python inbuilt regular expressions library
     7 import time
     8 from time import strptime #Useful time format conversion functions
     9 from datetime import datetime
    10 import random
    11 import calendar
    12 from ipaddress import IPv4Network,IPv4Address
    13 import pdb

Note that we have imported logging (line 5) and some useful time libraries (line 8,9). We have also imported 're' library for python regular expression. We will be using it in the code.

Now, lets move to the bottom of this file and locate function "__main__". This is start of execution of the code.

   295 if __name__ == "__main__":
   296         global isOccurrences
   297         isOccurrences = False
   298         dict_report_stats = {}
   299         g_smallest_day = 0
   300         g_highest_day = 0
   301         install_dir = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
   302         sys.path.insert(0, install_dir)
   303         sys.path.insert(0, install_dir + os.sep + ".." + os.sep + "TLCOMMON" + os.sep)
   304         g_hostname = socket.gethostname()
   305         file_name_format = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) == 2 else os.getenv("TL_WORKSPACE")+'_'+os.getenv("TL_ADAPTER")+'_'+os.getenv("TL_AGGREGATOR")
   306         from TLHook_common import *
   307         logfile_path = install_dir+ '/' + 'log_'+file_name_format+'.log'
   308         if not is_safe_path(logfile_path):
   309                 exit()
   310         logger = InitLogger(logfile_path,logging.INFO)
   311         logger.info("A new execution of script %s begins", __file__)
   312         int_time(logger)
   313         tz_file_path = install_dir+'/'+'timezone_'+file_name_format+'.csv'
   314         history_path = install_dir+'/history_'+file_name_format+'.csv'
   315         config_path = install_dir+'/config_'+file_name_format+'.csv'
   316
   317         if not is_safe_path(tz_file_path) or not is_safe_path(history_path) or not is_safe_path(config_path) :
   318                 logger.error("Path is invalid: history_path : %s ,timezone_file_path : %s , config_path : %s ",history_path,tz_file_path ,config_path )
   319                 exit()
   320         GetHostToTimeZoneDict(tz_file_path)
   321         ReadHistoryFile(history_path)
   322         ProcessUsingConfigFile(config_path, ProcessLineOfFile)
   323         PrintDashboardStatistics(dict_report_stats,logger,g_hostname,g_smallest_day,g_highest_day)
   324         WriteHistoryFile(history_path)
   325

After doing some initializations (such as setting PATH, log file, timezone etc), we import TLHook_common on line 306. This a common library and provides functions for Timezone, logging and offset maintenance etc. We set the

• hstory_file for maintaining the offset, timestamp etc after each execution. (line 314)
• config_file for reading the configuration from (it basically tells what files to read from what directory). (line 315)

Followed by this the real stuff starts. On line 321 we call ReadHistoryFile() function with history_path as the argument. We basically read the offsets maintained in the history_file to understand from where we want to start reading the files during this execution. Note that the script executes after a periodic interval and every execution will update the offset of the files (using WriteHistoryFile() function) at the end of its execution. Some global data structures are set in ReadHistoryFile() to help us seek() to the offset when we call ProcessUsingConfigFile() on line 322.

Function ProcessUsingConfigFile() takes two arguments, config_path and ProcessLineOfFile.