External Airflow service is a standalone nodejs application deployed on an external VM. The primary objective of the application is to act as an aggregator of Airflow metrics produced by external Airflow instances.

Prerequisites

Before starting the nodejs application, ensure that you run the following commands. 
sudo apt install nodejs npm
npm install kafkajs

The nodejs application can be shipped as a nodejs app or as a Docker image. To run the application, update the relevant topic for the Edge Kafka and Bootstrap Server IP and port number, Edge Kafka SASL credentials, and SSL certificate paths in the localconfig.js.

After the information is added to the localconfig.js file, the application can be started using nohup node stats.js localconfig.js &. This ensures an uninterrupted execution.

Once the backend is running on the VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance collector for the Edge Kafka topic, this facilitates populating of the Airflow metrics and health dashboards for external Airflow instances.