Gearlinux Showcases Rapid Prototype to Production Capabilities

Gearlinx recently had a customer request to “capture real-time IOT application time-series data, performance and system data including graphing with a one year retention schedule”.

These requirements are, by themselves, not groundbreaking innovations and exist widely in open source today. To avoid reinventing the wheel, the
initial search quickly drilled down to three options: InfluxDB, Prometheus and Victoria Metrics. Each option was given a short (30 minute) test run using various container implementations.

Victoria Metrics was ultimately selected as it was quick, easy to use and met all the requirements and these capabilities were added to the Gearlinx December release (25.12.34.0) now available to all customers.

The Gearlinux container implementation is flexible and comprehensive. It meant a prototype was running with full firewall, network and storage integration within minutes using the Victoria Metrics alpine/docker image. Gearlinux already has an extensive instantaneous runtime status in RAM with API access providing data in JSON format. JSON format and standard system tools allowed a few lines of script to provide over 500 individual time series compatible data points through Victoria Metrics on a minimally configured NR4416, and nearly 900 data points on the NR4448. Every aspect of an operational Gearlinux system is available via this mechanism, so all customer configured features and their status, for example, VPN's, serial connectivity, additional networking, host monitoring and overall system health can now be monitored over time.

An alpine/grafana container was configured, pointed at the Victoria metrics instance and the prototype graphing of the time series data was complete. The path to a solution that met the customers needs had been confirmed and new feature work could be done.

The December Gearlinux release contains the new Metrics feature for all of its OOB Management servers. It has been polished a little to integrate more nicely with the WebUI and the ZERO Cloud management platform, but it's beating heart still lies in the simple container based prototype that was developed and solidified over an incredibly short time.

The Gearlinux firmware benefits from over two decades of development and experience. Gearlinx prides itself on keeping all firmware up to date with kernel, library and application patches and updates. Gearlinx are the experts for embedded Linux deployments. The same firmware deployed for our customers is used on our NR and Duckfone platforms. All improvements made to Gearlinux benefit all our customers.