Challenge Overview
Overview
The client is looking to take a MVP product created by topcoder to the next level. The application consists of a monitoring agent that collects data (e.g. performance metrics/statistics data) from Windows based laptop/desktop computers and periodically connects to a backend API which stores the data in HBase. Administrators can use this data to make decisions regarding new laptops, additional memory, software patches and upgrades, etc.
In this Co-pilot challenge, the deliverable will be a gameplan and associated details and approach to get the features below added to the product. Source-code for the exiting application will be provided in the forums and you will need to refer to this in creating your plans.
INCREASED PRIZE
We've increased the prize for this opportunity to account for the fact that we're covering a few different aspects of the overall Application.
New Features / Changed Features
Splunk Integration: The client would like to use their Splunk instance as a tool for analyzing the data collected by their device monitoring agents. Right now, they are doing this manually - exporting data from the database and importing into Splunk "by hand".
They would like to automate this process so that they can trigger a transfer of data from HBase to Splunk by specifying client ID and time / date range.
They would like a command-line tool that given a list of serial #s and a date range, will query the existing HBase database and transfer the data to Splunk.
Currently, there is the ability to do a query on Splunk which produces a list of end user system serial #s. Idealy, this could be fed into the tool to trigger this transfer.
Create a Version of the Agent for Mac: The Windows agent was developed using the community and full source-code and links to the associated challenges will be provided. It is expected that a more streamlined approach can be taken for the Mac client since we have the experience and code of the Windows agent to refer to. The Mac agent needs to be API compatible with the Windows agent (so that they can log data to the same endpoints).
Security Updates: The existing agent and Node endpoint needs to be updated to use SSL when exchanging information, it's currently unencrypted, using http for Agent to endpoint communication.
General Notes
Specifically how you approach this plan is up to you, however, one suggestion would be to divide it into phases for each of the areas above.
Review and Selection Criteria
Strategy discussion: This is a very important aspect of the gameplan in our view. Describing why we will use each challenge is important but please take time to describe a clear overall strategy for this effort.
Clear and realistic plan: How clear is the plan and how likely is it to succeed? Is the scope and pricing in the correct range? Are the different, iterative phases of development clear and easy to understand? Are the prizes / prices accurate? Is there thought around how we will QA and test the results?