ROS 2: RTI Tools Overview

RTI's specialized tools for DDS give you vastly increased visibility into your system, which saves time and improves the outcome.

As an example, consider a ROS 2 system running a simple "Hello World!" pub/sub pair, using the default ROS 2 demo_nodes_cpp package and the 'talker' and 'listener' applications.

ROS 2 command-line tools will show you 3 topics in this system:

  • parameter_events: used by the ROS 2 Parameter system.
  • rosout: used for message logging.
  • chatter: this carries the 'Hello' text string messages.

 

RTI Administration Console show a much more complete picture of the DDS network under ROS 2.
Here's what it reveals about the same 'Hello World' system in the above example:

With only the above home screen, Admin Console will instantly reveal:

  • DDS Topics: The complete list of DDS topics, along with their health and connectivity status. Why are there so many topics?
  • Topic Graph: Shows a graphical network view of the entities on a topic.
  • Entity Info: Details about the DDS entity: its health, ID, Process, etc.
  • QoS Detail: Report on the Quality-of-Service settings for the selected item.
  • QoS Matching: Detailed info about QoS (mis-)matching between entities.
  • Processes using DDS: shows the entire system by platform and process.

In addition, Admin Console can subscribe to and visualize selected topics, create publishers for those topics, and monitor and control RTI infrastructure service products.
RTI Admin Console is the go-to tool for connectivity and system health issues.

 

RTI Monitor shows the effects of QoS settings on your system in real time.
Using an instrumentation mode of the Connext DDS libraries, the state of the internal DDS buffers and controls are revealed and graphed while your system is operational.   This tool is indispensable for getting your system to work at peak performance, especially when scaling your system.

Connext Observability Framework is a full-stack observability system for both Connext and non-Connext technologies, with the ability to monitor remote and widely distributed systems.
RTI-Observability-Framework

Note that these and other RTI tools are designed for any DDS system; they complementand do not interfere with the ROS 2 tools.
When used together they can accelerate your system development effort and achieve your performance goals.

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