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

• PLANTA pulse expects the availability of the following basic services: DNS.
• 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