System Requirements

Dimensioning appliance (for ca. 50 users):

General

Information

• PLANTA pulse is an isomorphic web application written in JavaScript. For running PLANTA pulse, the following components are absolutely necessary during runtime:

  • Reverse proxy and Load balancer

  • Application server

  • Database

• Furthermore, users of PLANTA pulse require a client.

• The application server and the database are not replaceable.

• PLANTA only supports the operation on Linux with/on node.js and MongoDB.

• The reverse proxy and client (web browser) components can differ from those used by PLANTA for on-premises installations as long as the same functionality is available:

  • Reverse proxy

    • PLANTA uses Traefik, which provides the following basic functions:

      • TLS termination

      • Load balancing

      • WebSocket Support

  • Client/Web browser

    • PLANTA uses Chrome

    • A browser based on Blink is recommended

    • Other modern browsers like Firefox or Safari are supported as well.

Network

Information

• It is strongly recommended to use valid certificates for all services used by PLANTA pulse and for PLANTA pulse itself and to renew these automatically.

Network access

• Reverse proxy and external services

  • If the Reverse proxy Traefik provided by PLANTA is used for TLS termination and Let's Encrypt is used as CA, the appropriate access is required.

• Client and application server

  • Generally, only requests by the reverse proxy are processed on the application server. These requests can be categorized as follows:

    • Static resources

      • The browser requests resources like images, fonts, HTML, JavaScript files etc. These accesses can partially be responded to by the reverse proxy directly.

    • Accesses to the REST-API of PLANTA pulse

      • External clients can use this interface to access data from PLANTA pulse.

    • Websocket

      • For each user session, a web socket connection to the application server is established (via the reverse proxy) after initializing the client-sided JavaScript code.

      • This connection is the basis for all user interaction and the related application data.

      • The connection persists as long as the client session is active.

      • If the client session is inactive (no user interaction with the JavaScript code in the client), the connection is cancelled, but it can be restored at any time.

• Application server and database

  • Between node.js and the MongoDB, a session pool is used to avoid too many network resources from being used.

  • Every application server keeps the corresponding connectinos to each node of the MongoDB.

• Application server and external services

  • Depending on the configuration, different external services are addressed via TCP connections.

    • PLANTA project

      • During hybrid usage of PLANTA project and PLANTA pulse, the web services of PLANTA project are being requested.

    • E-Mail

      • If e-mail notifications are to be sent out of PLANTA pulse, a SMTP service is required.

      • From Release 30 of PLANTA pulse, the e-mail server used needs to support at least the TLS version 1.2. More Information

    • Telegram

      • If Telegram notifications are to be used, access to the Telegram services are required.

Hardware Requirements

Information

• Since the CPU and storage requirements depend strongly on the use profile of the users, only experience values can be listed here, which are rather generous estimates.

• These indications only apply to the application view and are therefore no recommendation for the server configuration.

• To balance out peak loads, it is recommended to plan at least one CPU core per deployment or to set up one additional PLANTA pulse instance.

• In the case of very large deployments, it can be necessary to adjust this value accordingly.

Details

• CPU

  • Per 200 active users we recommend using at least one CPU core and one application server instance.

• Memory

  • Per 200 active users we recommend at least 2 GB of RAM and one PLANTA pulse instance.

Example

• For 1200 users, from which 1000 are assumed to be active at the same time, this means:

  • 6 PLANTA pulse instances (5+1)

  • 6 CPU cores (5+1)

  • 12 GB RAM