MonitorWare concepts

Article created 2003-05-15 by Rainer Gerhards.

The SETP Protocol

SETP is the "Simple Event Transfer Protocol" SETP allows reliable delivery of events between SETP supporting systems. SETP was developed for MonitorWare Agent basically and now it is added in the EventReporter 6.2 Professional version and WinSyslog Enterprise Edition as well.WinSyslog works as SETP client, only. It can forward only SETP messages. Whereas the WinSyslog Enterprise Edition works as client and server. As such, it can forward events generated and gathered by them to central or intermediary SETP servers. The MonitorWare Agent can operate both as a SETP server and client and as such also as a relay. It plays a vital role in a complex, distributed environment.

It allows synchronous communication between SETP clients and servers. With SETP, an event can be forwarded exactly as it was on the original event generating system. For example, if a syslog message is received on a remote system that exact syslog message can be forwarded via as many SETP relays as is configured. During that relaying, no information from the original message is altered or lost. As such, each of the relays as well as the final SETP server will see the original source address, time stamps and message.

Furthermore, SETP guarantees reliable delivery. It is based on TCP, so each of the SETP peers know exactly that the communication partner can successfully receive and process the message. SETP guarantees that new events are only forwarded after the previous ones were successfully received and processed. SETP also checks for on the wire errors. Due to its characteristics, SETP can successfully be used in barely or occasionally connected environments like radio connected systems.

The SETP design is influenced by many industry standard movements, most notably the BEEP protocol and XML. However, SETP is optimized to have a very lightweight footprint. As such, it can be implemented even in low powered devices with little overhead.