Accelerating the Development of Distributed Systems
Connext Tools are critical for Industrial Internet of Things developers whether they are just starting out with DDS or have been building DDS applications for a while. Connext Tools ease the entire development lifecycle - from design to production.
Powerful Tools for the Entire Development Process
- Development and troubleshooting – Diagnosing a connectivity issue is challenging, especially during development when most debugging mechanisms are primitive. Tools that provide insight into a distributed system can help analyze the root cause, find the right solution and shorten product time to market.
- System monitoring and administration - Maintaining the health of application connectivity is critical in developing IIoT systems. Insightful tools that provide minimally intrusive visibility into running systems will enable developers to resolve operational problems, fine tune system performance and take preventative actions.
- Functional, systems and performance testing – Tools that provide a variety of ways to simulate error conditions significantly improve code quality and reduce the effort for both R&D and QA teams.
RTI Tools included in Connext DDS Professional
Launcher: Start Here
Launcher is a "single pane of glass" view for insight into the entire Connext DDS environment. It keeps tabs on all your Connext Tools. An intuitive Launcher interface helps effortlessly add new components and target platforms to the current Connext DDS environment, see what is already installed, find documentation and web resources, create new source-code projects and run all the Connext tools and command-line utilities.
Administration Console: Take Control
Administration Console is an essential tool for troubleshooting and monitoring all Connext DDS infrastructure services as well as visualizing data directly from your system. The Administration Console minimizes troubleshooting time and effort in all stages of application development by proactively analyzing system settings and log messages. Problems get highlighted, making them easy to find and address.The Administration Console provides multiple views into your system, allowing developers to:
- Inspect and visualize instances and samples
- Show samples as graphs or tables
- Identify QoS mismatches (match graphs)
- Find data type mismatches
- Discover and inspect processes, topics and data types
And much more
RTI Connext DDS: Data Visualization Overview
Monitor: Troubleshoot Like a Pro
Monitor helps troubleshoot DDS-enabled applications throughout the entire process of integration and testing. It also provides continuous visibility into deployed systems in production through real-time graphical views of the entire ecosystem of applications connected by Connext DDS. Monitor aids in diagnosing unusual behavior patterns and reduces risks associated with connectivity issues and network usage.
Monitor is critical when it comes to performance optimization. RTI provides an instrumentation package in addition to the Connext DDS libraries. The package can produce a wealth of real-time performance data from the running applications and publish this data to the Monitor. The instrumentation has minimal performance overhead for applications.
Recording Console: Capture Data
Recording Console: Capture Data Recording Console is a simple interface for using the RTI Record and Replay Services. This tool significantly reduces Recording Service configuration time and complexity, and does not require any programming. The Recording Console makes it easy to use the Recording Service for testing algorithms and other processing logic against pre-recorded test data, conducting regression testing from ‘golden’ data inputs, or recording live data from the field for post-mission analysis.
Learn how to leverage Recording and Replay capability for developing industrial grade applications »
Using the Connext DDS Record/Replay Feature
Distributed Logger: Receive Real-Time Warnings
Distributed Logger delivers real-time notifications when error or warning conditions occur anywhere in the DDS environment. It enables applications to log messages using existing logging infrastructure and to publish them to the Connext Databus. It also publishes Connext DDS log messages to the same topics. Warnings and errors are correlated from Connext DDS with log messages from applications, greatly aiding troubleshooting. All the log messages can be centrally collected and saved for later analysis and troubleshooting. Both Monitor and Admin Console can be used to see and analyze the messages.
Wireshark: Understand Network Packets
Wireshark is a purpose-built network protocol analyzer that looks at all the packets in your network and captures the ones in which you are interested. RTI provides special plugins for decoding DDS messages and examining their content. The display shows packets in real time as they arrive. Wireshark is invaluable for learning DDS as well as a go-to tool for deep packet inspection and network connectivity troubleshooting. It is free and available for download from https://www.wireshark.org/
Add-in for MS Excel : Teach Spreadsheets New Tricks
Turn your spreadsheets into powerful analytic and visualization capability for your IIoT systems. RTI Add-in for Microsoft Excel provides turnkey, bi-directional integration between Connext DDS and Microsoft Excel. See your IIoT data in spreadsheets as cells, formulas and charts come to life with real-time data streams.
Shapes: Learn DDS Fast
Get your entire team up to speed with DDS fundamentals quickly! RTI Shapes Demo is a powerful learning tool for understanding the DDS concepts, such as publish-subscribe messaging, data centricity and Quality of Service (QoS). Shapes is a visually appealing, game-like application that allows you to experiment by modeling the desired behavior without coding. It is suitable for users of any level and does not require programming skills or prior DDS knowledge.
Develop your DDS expertise by downloading Shapes for free »
DDS Ping: Reach Out
DDS Ping can help discover quickly if firewall settings on the network are preventing DDS discovery traffic. While the standard ping utility can confirm basic reachability between machines, it cannot check if the ports needed for DDS discovery are open. DDS Ping (rtiddsping) utility does exactly that.
DDS Spy: Take a Peek
DDS Spy enables inspection of data that applications are publishing. It is a command-line utility that can subscribe to select DDS topics and display data samples it receives to the terminal.