Nowadays, information systems make use of a series of different components and platforms. Being able to monitor the health status of such components and platforms, along with the overall health status of the operation supported by such information systems is of paramount importance. The immediate solution for these monitoring needs is to use vendor specific applications, which results in having to look and understand several different interfaces. As it will be explained, there are available solutions that integrate such needs on a single platform. However, these solutions failed to provide a monitoring dashboard for the entire system operation, with highly customizable dashboard interface, easily defined metrics and easy mobile application availability. This paper describes an architecture for configurable dashboards capable of presenting heterogeneous metrics, side by side, regardless of their origin. A prototype, based on such architecture, is presented as a proof of concept. This prototype is being used to monitor the Cape Verde's Justice Information System. The result, based on the proposed architecture and prototype, is a custom tool with a single configuration file that can be adapted to different thresholds, metrics and monitoring scenarios.
This paper presents a new paradigm for implementing the authentication of individuals within Web sessions. Nowadays many countries have deployed electronic identity cards (eID tokens) for their citizens' personal identification, but these are not yet well integrated with the authentication of people in Web sessions. We used the concept of Personal Identity Provider (PIdP) to replace (or complement) the role ordinarily given to institutional Identity Providers (IdPs), which are trusted third parties to which service providers delegate the identification and the authentication of their clients. By running locally on a citizen's computer, the PIdP paradigm is well suited to assist his/her eID-based authentication. In this paper we describe an eID-based authentication protocol handled by a PIdP, its implementation and its integration in a production scenario (a campus-wide, Shibboleth IdP-based authentication infrastructure used in University of Aveiro).
Traditional cloud computing providers enable developers to program and deploy applications in the cloud by using platform as a service (PaaS) providers. Despite the benefits of such an approach, this service model usually comes with a high level of the lock in effect into the service provider. The lock in effect occurs when a software developer needs to change its cloud provider. When this happens, it usually means a major application rewrite, specific for the new PaaS. This paper details the initial results of a project whose goal is to build a PaaS where vendor lock in does not occur. With this PaaS, developers wishing to deploy their applications into the cloud may continue to program using their usual development environments. There are no necessary changes required to make the application PaaS compatible. As a proof of concept, we developed an open source PaaS management application as a regular web application and then deployed it on the cloud.
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