Global presentation¶

The historical Operations Portal has been built as an integration platform, allowing for strong interaction among existing tools with similar scope but also filling up gaps wherever functionality has
been lacking. Moreover some features implement numerous work flows derived from procedures put in place during the EGEE and EGI projects.

These features came out of requirements expressed by end users or administrators of Virtual Organizations (VO), Regional Operations Centres (ROCs) or Resources Centres and Operations Coordination Centre (OCC) of EGI.
The information on display is retrieved from several distributed static and dynamic sources – databases, Grid Information System, Web Services, etc. – and gathered within the portal.

This has resulted in numerous tools that have become critical to sites like the User Tracking feature (to contact unknown users out of their DN in case of observed grid misuse for example) or the Alarm Notification feature (to subscribe to alerts upon monitoring failures). Linking this information in the portal has enabled us to display relevant and high added-value views of static and dynamic information of the production grid infrastructure.

This information can be provided by the central operational tools or by regional instances of these tools .
Authentication and authorization is based on user’s roles associated to the user’s certificate. Complementary to the goal of securely processing information and workflows, the portal also fosters communication between different actors of the project, through channels such as the Broadcast and Downtime Notification mechanisms
The architecture is the same for the both versions of the portal and is composed of three modules:

• A local database – to store information related to the users or the VO .
• A web module – graphical user interface – which is currently integrated into the Symfony framework
• A Data Aggregation and Unification Service named Lavoisier

Lavoisier is the component used to store, consolidate and “feed” data into the web application.
This module provides information from various sources without the portal being directly dependent on those information sources thanks to a caching mechanism.
This indeed protects us from intermittent failures of information sources.
In the figure below we depict how the two instances of the Operations Portal (CIC Operations Portal and the new Operations Portal) are integration platforms for several heterogeneous information sources.
These instances rely heavily upon Lavoisier to provide to users –being end-users, operators, resource centres or NGI/ROC.