Project Charter
Eclipse COSMOS Project Charter - v0.50

Overview

The proposed Eclipse COSMOS project is an open source collaborative software development project dedicated to providing a robust, extensible, commercial quality, and freely available industry tools platform intended to reduce the cost and complexity of implementing effective and highly inter-operable tools to be used during system management.

The project is proposed to incubate under the guidance and supervision of the Eclipse TPTP PMC and then graduate to a top level Eclipse project.

Mission

The mission of the Eclipse COSMOS Project is to build a generic, extensible, standards-based components for a tools platform upon which software developers can create specialized, differentiated, and inter-operable offerings of tools for system management.

Specifically, COSMOS targets instrumentation for the normalization and organized presentation and interaction with data resulting from system monitoring as well as resource modeling as these are cornerstones for creating inter-operable tools for systems management.

Exemplary tools will also be provided to demonstrate the function and value of these COSMOS components. Expansion of this mission is subject to the governance of the Project Management Committee.

Scope

COSMOS will provide instrumentation and data storage that will define a normalized exchange format of the data. This normalized data will be exposed via user interface components for basic reporting and viewing of monitored information. Where possible, COSMOS intends to leverage existing management infrastructures, e.g. JMX, OSGi, and WSDM, to interact with the managed system. COSMOS will provide tooling, targeted at the developer and tester, to enable systems to be monitored via these infrastructures. An example of such tooling is the ARM and JMX instrumentation currently provided by the TPTP Monitoring sub-project. These TPTP components help application writers develop and test instrumentation.

The project will also deliver exemplary tools that: verify the utility of and illustrate the appropriate use of the COSMOS components, support the development and maintenance of the components, and are extensible via documented programmatic interfaces.

COSMOS will not provide the parts of a system management solution that would be considered a run time component, for example similar to that provided by OSGi. Rather, COSMOS will provide normalized data aggregation and visualization, as well as a user interface components to deal with system information. COSMOS intends to leverage the run time of infrastructure such as OSGi and WSDM to gather data for visualization. The scope of COSMOS does not encompass function outside of instrumentation and data visualization associated with systems monitoring and resource modeling. As a further example, COSMOS will not implement a data transport layer, and instead will enable the plugging in of other transports.

Governance

This Charter inherits all terms not otherwise defined herein from the Eclipse Standard Top-Level Charter. This includes, but is not limited to, sections on the Program Management Committee, Roles, Project Organization, The Development Process, and Licensing. The governance section of this charter will be applied once COSMOS graduates to a top level project and does not affect the TPTP charter. COSMOS will adhere to the TPTP governance process during incubation and intends to mirror the TPTP structure when graduated to a top level project.

In addition COSMOS will institute the following Groups to help manage the project:

Requirements Group

The PMC Lead shall establish an Eclipse COSMOS Project Requirements Group (the "Requirements Group") responsible for gathering, reviewing and categorizing incoming requirements, and proposing a coherent set of themes and priorities that will drive the Project Road map.

The PMC Lead will designate the Requirements Group Chair. The Requirements Group shall be comprised of one representative designated by each contributing organization and other individuals designated from time to time by the PMC Lead.

The Requirements Group will accomplish its objectives by working closely with their represented organizations and individuals, the Project development teams, and the ecosystem.

Architecture Group

The PMC Lead shall establish an Eclipse COSMOS Project Architecture Group (the "Architecture Group") responsible for the development, articulation, and maintenance of the Project architecture and alignment thereof with the Eclipse architecture.

The PMC Lead will designate the Architecture Group Chair and will also designate the Project representative to the Eclipse Architecture Council. The Architecture Group shall be comprised of a subset Project Commiters nominated by the Chair and other individuals designated from time to time by the PMC Lead who represent the Project architecture.

The Architecture Group will accomplish its objectives by working closely with the Project development teams and the Eclipse Architecture Council.

Planning Group

The PMC Lead shall establish an Eclipse COSMOS Project Planning Group (the "Planning Group") responsible for the development and maintenance of a Project Release Plan consistent with the Architecture, supporting the Road map, and supported by resource commitments of contributing organizations and individuals.

The PMC Lead will designate the Planning Group Chair and will also designate the Project representative to the Eclipse Planning Council. The Planning Group shall be comprised of one representative designated by each contributing organization and other individuals designated from time to time by the PMC Lead. Additionally, the Requirements Group and Architecture Group chairpersons will be members of the Planning Group.

The Planning Group will accomplish its objectives by working closely with their represented organizations, the Project development teams, and the Eclipse Planning Council.

Structure

At a high level, the following describes the basic role of each project.

See the project descriptions for Monitoring User Interface, Data Collection and server, Build to Manage and Resource Modeling for additional information on the Projects under this Charter.

Coordinated Release Cycles
All Projects under the Eclipse COSMOS Project will have coordinated release plans, milestone dates, freeze cycles, builds, and ship dates. Project Leads are responsible for coordinating their respective Projects while the Eclipse COSMOS Project Planning Group will coordinate across Projects.

The Eclipse COSMOS Project will typically have release plans coincident with Eclipse Platform releases plus additional more frequent interim releases where appropriate.

The PMC may specify additional detailed development process guidelines specific to this Project.