Implement an optional heartbeat periodic for the base agent

VOLTTRON / volttron

VOLTTRON Distributed Control System Platform

https://volttron.readthedocs.io/

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Implement an optional heartbeat periodic for the base agent #390

Closed jhaack closed 8 years ago

jhaack commented 8 years ago

This task should be able to accomplish the following:

[x] Be available to all agents inheriting from Agent (volttron.platform.vip.agent.Agent I believe)
[x] Be able to enable/disable and modify period through one or more rpc calls.
[x] Be able to specify heartbeat_enabled and period through configuration files.
[x] Will publish heartbeat to the pubsub bus at heartbeat/agentid/uuid.
[ ] The message will be a string representation of a python datetime localtime that is formatted using @kmonson spiffy function

See #394 services and core agents that should utilize this by default.

craig8 commented 8 years ago

@jhaack @mikeroup @kmonson please review and let me know if I have scoped this out well enough. Please look again!

ghost commented 8 years ago

Why is the topic 'heartbeat/agentid/uuid'? The uuid is added automatically by pubsub.

craig8 commented 8 years ago

Ummmm...are you talking about the sender as grabbing the uuid? That is not the uuid that is the vip.identity. The uuid I am talking about is the actual agent installation directory .volttron/agents/uuid/listeneragent-0.1. The vip.identity (depending on which agent is started) isn't unique.

If I am incorrect then I am not sure what you mean about it being added automatically by pubsub.

ghost commented 8 years ago

Okay but what about service-y agents that are started in main? They aren't explicitly installed like other agents.

craig8 commented 8 years ago

For the service agenta there will only be one on a specific instance so it will be unique. For any agent that is "installed" i.e. via volttron-ctl there will be a uuid folder name. There may or may not be a unique vip.identity specified in the agent configuration file.

The ultimate goal is to be able to state that at this point in time this agent known as foo is running. If there are multiple foo agents installed there need to be a way to distinguish between each of the installed agents.

Note you can get the agents uuid directly from the environment using os.environ['AGENT_UUID']

craig8 commented 8 years ago

What is interesting is I keep waffling about where this should be put. Now I think it should hang off the pubsub system since it will use pubsub as it's mechanism for the heartbeat.

ghost commented 8 years ago

It would use pubsub but is not directly related to its implementation. It also needs to know about rpc and core.