Managing Connections

This section describes how to connect the Node.js Operational Insights SDK to an Operational Insights cluster. It contains best practices as well as information on TLS/SSL and advanced connection options.

Our Getting Started pages cover the basics of making a connection to an Operational Insights cluster. This page is a wider look at the topic.

Connecting to a Cluster

A connection to an Insights cluster is represented by an analytics object. Connect to Operational Insights by calling analytics.createInstance with the connection string, credentials, and any required optional parameters.

const operationalInsights = require('couchbase-operational-insights')

async function main() {
    // Update this to your cluster
    const clusterConnStr = 'https://<your_hostname>:<PORT>'
    const username = 'username'
    const password = 'Password123!'
    // User Input ends here.

    const credential = new operationalInsights.Credential(username, password)
    const cluster = operationalInsights.createInstance(clusterConnStr, credential)

Connection Strings

Typically, an Operational Insights Enterprise cluster will be behind a load balancer, and you will be making a connection over TLS — so the port used will be 443. This is the defaut for the SDK, so port 443 does not need to be specified: https://insights.example.com.

You must specify the schema — either https:// (for TLS) or http:// (for insecure connections — perhaps on a development machine) in the connection string. The default port for insecure connections is port 80.

If you’re connecting to a cluster directly, without a load balancer, you can specify the port in the connection string: https://insights.example.com:18095. For a standalone Operational Insights cluster, the port is usually 18095 (or 8095 for an insecure connection). Make sure to check with your administrator.

Client Settings Parameters

Connection strings can also include client settings, which will override any that are also set in the code.

Connection string with two parameters

https://insights.example.com?timeout.connect_timeout=30s&timeout.query_timeout=2m

The full list of recognized parameters is documented in the client settings reference.

Authentication by Credential

Similarly to the Authenticator abstraction in Couchbase Operational SDKs, Insights SDKs use a Credential abstraction covering regular password authentication (Basic Access Authentication), JSON Web Tokens (JWT), and Client Certificates through mTLS.

Basic Access Authentication is shown in the example above.

JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

JWT is supported with Operational Insights Server 2.2+.

async function main() {
    const _EXAMPLE_JWT = 'eyJhbGbiOiJSUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.payload.signature'
    const endpoint = 'https://--your-instance--'
    const credential = new JwtCredential(_EXAMPLE_JWT)
    const cluster = createInstance(endpoint, credential)

Certificate Authority

To make a TLS connection to an Operational Insights Enterprise cluster with a root certificate issued by a trusted CA (Certificate Authority), you do not need to add this to your configuration — the platform’s defaults are automatically trusted.

The cluster’s root certificate just needs to be issued by a CA whose certificate is in your system trust store. This includes well known CAs (including GoDaddy and Verisign), plus any other CA certificates that you wish to add.

Certificate Authentication

Certificate authentication is supported with Operational Insights Server 2.2+. A conceptual and architectural overview of Operational Insights’s support of X.509 certificates is provided in the Server certificates docs. Practical information on handling certificates can be found in the Operational Insights certificates docs.

The Insights SDK authenticates the client during the TLS handshake. The SDK reads the certificate and private key from a PKCS#12 file:

  const clusterConnStr = 'https://--your-instance--'
  const cert = fs.ReadFileSync('/path/to/client/certificate.pem')
  const key = fs.ReadFileSync('/path/to/client/key.pem')
  const credential = new CertificateCredential({
    cert: cert,
    key: key
  })

  const cluster = createInstance(clusterConnStr, credential)

Local Development

We strongly recommend that the client and server are in the same LAN-like environment (e.g. AWS Region).