Is there any way to know if a CouchDB database is the source of a pull continuous replication?

Question

For my example, let's say we have two servers. Server A creates a continuous pull replication with a local database on Server A. The source of this pull replication is a database on Server B.

I know that Server A can monitor the status of the replication either by the _replicator database if it was created that way or by querying _active_tasks. Nevertheless, is there any way for Server B to know that it is the source of a continuous pull replication, except by monitoring the GET requests?

Even then, we are using Cloudant as our Server B, monitoring through a proxy is not an option. So if a database on Cloudant is part of a replication not created on the Cloudant server, there is absolutely no way to know it since it won't show up in Cloudant's _active_tasks, am I correct?

EDIT: After communicating with Samantha Scharr from Cloudant Support and she said that "making logs available to our clients is a concern that we are working on". This would not be such a problem once this is done.

Thank you, Paul

Answer 1

There is no such. For CouchDB replication process is not something special to track on.

Say, you have three instances: A, B and C. CouchDB allows you to run replication process on A to replicate data from B to C. For instance A the replication process will be explicitly defined in _active_tasks since replication is running within separate Erlang process. But for B and C instances this will be looked as that some HTTP client calling their public API resources with some payload. They will never know that someone trying to keep them synced.

Theoretically, you may write some logs parse or proxy that will aware about remote replication running by analyzing HTTP requests basing on Replication protocol definition. But I fear you have to make it smart enough to not let him make a lot of false-positive matches for regular clients.