Visualize ROS 2 Communications Performance

Do you want to learn how to monitor a ROS 2 talker/listener in Vulcanexus?

Keep reading! This tutorial and the video below will explain how to use the Fast DDS Statistics Backend included in Vulcanexus TOOLS together with Prometheus and Grafana to create a personalized visualization of ROS 2 communications performance.

 The Vulcanexus TOOLS component offers several possibilities when it comes to statistics monitoring:

• ROS 2 Monitor is a graphical tool that tracks and visualizes ROS 2 networks in real-time.
• Fast DDS Statistics Backend is a library that enables the recollection of performance data concerning DDS communication, in this case, the ROS 2 nodes communication. This real-time data can be leveraged to monitoring systems such as Prometheus and visualizing tools like Grafana.

How does it work?

When installing Vulcanexus the statistics module of Fast DDS is already compiled but needs to be enabled. The publication of statistical metrics can be done Statistical metrics can be published easily through the XML configuration file or by setting an environment variable.

Secondly, to track ROS 2 communication in Vulcanexus, Fast DDS Statistics Backend is necessary to extract the data. Therefore a pre-requirement is that the Vulcanexus installation includes the Vulcanexus TOOLS element.

The third step is to build a monitoring application including the Fast DDS Statistics library and the Prometheus Exporter library. This application will receive all the talker and listener data. With the help of Prometheus Exporter, the time series data will be exported from the Fast DDS Statistics Backend and imported into Prometheus. Prometheus is a versatile open-source monitoring system offering seamless interoperability with other analytics and visualization applications such as Grafana.

Once the ROS 2 performance data is available in Grafana, the user can create a personalized dashboard to visualize the real-time statistics. Typical data to visualize are latency and throughput but also sub-messages sent by the ROS 2 nodes used in the communication, such as the heartbeat or the data itself, can be displayed.

For further technical information please also visit the Vulcanexus tutorial documentation.

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