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Plans

Abstract

Plans are special Punch applications that periodically execute punchlines. A plan is similar to a CRON utility. It triggers punchlines at regular points in time.

Plans provide many useful and important features:

  • resiliency : a Plan can be interrupted and restarted from another server, it will properly resume its processing from its last saved state.
  • logging : plans log useful information to be easily monitored.
  • configuration : a plan is defined as a simple hjson or json or yaml file.
  • templating : every punchline executed has been been templated with time ranges.

The following diagram illustrates the way it works. Your punchline configuration file is actually a template file. The plan will be in charge of periodically defining date values, then generating actual job files from the templates, which in turn is scheduled for execution.

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Here are typical use cases for Plans:

  • Fetching external data : a Plan schedules a punchline every hour to read some dataset from an external source. It enriches it with useful contextual data. Finally, it stores it in some downstream sink.
  • Aggregation and Statistics : a Plan schedules a punchline that reads time-ranged dataset from Elasticsearch. It computes some statistics and writes them back to Elasticsearch.
  • Alerting : a Plan periodically execute a punchline in charge of checking some alert condition. This is typically how Elastalert works. You can similarly use a plan to compute more sophisticated alerting rules that include machine learning algorithms.

Info

Checkout the plan tutorial for a simple example. The plan configuration is defined in the reference guide plan configuration chapter.

Resources

See