Web service standards question - heartbeats

[Martin Hill]

Alasdair Allan wrote:

> Martin Hill wrote:
> 
>>For example, the optional 'describing itself in VO terms' (ie returning
>>VOResource) is surely necessary to make the VO work, yet I don't see how
>>heartbeat is mandatory to making the VO work!  For mission critical
>>systems yes, but the VO is hardly mission critical.  Where are the
>>heartbeats going to go?  What is monitoring them?  What alarms will be
>>raised and where when a heartbeat fails?
> 
> 
> Depends what you're using the VO for, remember some of us are talking to
> real time systems. If I want to data mine your service for useful
> information I want to know how robust/reliable it is, I can get this from
> the HeartBeat and Will's proposed statistics gathering services (to find
> the history). 

Hmmm a confusion of terms.  Real time is not (necessarily) mission critical nor 
v.v.  I think you want 'getAvailability' - you (or your agents) are asking the 
service how robust/reliable it is, and perhaps some prediction about when it is 
expected to be offline, etc.  'Heartbeats' are used to raise alarms when systems 
fail and are not even to do with real time stuff.

I agree that *some* services might need alarms to be raised immediately they go 
down - which is why I'm not happy just letting this slide and using this 
'heartbeat' term for one feature that is not only incorrect, but liable to get 
mixed up with a completley different feature.  Some services may need to provide 
both heartbeats *and* availability information, and it would be inconvenient (to 
put it mildly) to combine the two.

> 
> I reather like the name actually... :)

Yes... it's just wrong that's all... >:D

Perhaps a get 'Sickness' or 'Health' or 'Life' would be more appealing? :-)

-- 
Martin Hill
www.mchill.net
+44 7901 55 24 66