Horizon

The Horizon service is responsible for collecting, cleaning, and formatting incoming data. It consists of Listeners, Workers, and Roombas. Horizon can be started, stopped, and restarted with the bin/horizon.d script.

Listeners

Listeners are responsible for listening to incoming data. There are currently two types: a TCP-pickle listener on port 2024, and a UDP-messagepack listener on port 2025. The Listeners are easily extendible. Once they read a metric from their respective sockets, they put it on a shared queue that the Workers read from. For more on the Listeners, see [Getting Data Into Skyline](getting-data-into-skyline.html).

Workers

The workers are responsible for processing metrics off the queue and inserting them into Redis. They work by popping metrics off of the queue, encoding them into Messagepack, and appending them onto the respective Redis key of the metric.

Roombas

The Roombas are responsible for trimming and cleaning the data in Redis. You will only have a finite amount of memory on your server, and so if you just let the Workers append all day long, you would run out of memory. The Roomba cycles through each metric in Redis and cuts it down so it is as long as settings.FULL_DURATION. It also dedupes and purges old metrics.