Storing monitoring data in a database? no problem!

Ganglia is a monitoring system that uses RRDTool for its storage and graphs. This provides an excellent solution for monitoring, but suffers from data becoming less detailed ("averaged out") when you look further back in time. This is deliberate, but does make later analysis of the data difficult.

If you wanted to keep detailed records of monitoring data with MonAMI that don't degrade over time, now you can, I've committed changes to the mysql plugin in CVS. In addition to monitoring a MySQL database, the plugin can now store information. You tell it which table and how to map the information into that table and it does the rest, it'll even create the table if it doesn't exist.

Greetings from CHEP 2007!

Greetings from Victoria!

For those that thought things have been a bit quiet recently; well, yes, they have been. Recently, all my time has been spent preparing for the CHEP 2007 and All Hands 2007 conferences.

CHEP has now started, with various GridPP people here. Graeme, Greig and myself are giving a poster-presentation of MonAMI at CHEP. The poster is deliberately "visual": I'm aiming to use it to talk people through the concepts, rather than providing a poster that has lots of text.

For those interested, the poster was put together using Inkscape: a SVG editor. The whole poster is made up of SVG graphics with the only exception of the GridPP backgrounds and University logos (which are, unfortunately, large bitmaps). Inkscape is a very powerful editor. If you are doing anything involving SVG, I would recommend inkscape. Be sure to take the tutorials: they're both easy to follow and will greatly increase your productivity.

CHEP itself is an excellent conference. There's lots of people in the HEP computing field often facing similar computational challenges. I'm looking forward to meeting more people during the poster sessions.

Monitoring grid jobs by VO from the RBs point-of-view.

Gidon Moont (of the 3D Real-Time Monitor fame) has come up with another monitoring tool. Using the data collected from all the WLCG Resource Brokers, graphs are generated that plot the number of jobs each VO has running and queued at your site. More information is available at the Real Time Monitoring page (the "GridLoad Graphs" section).

What's particularly nice is he's included support for Google Gadgets. Gadgets, if you've not come across them, are a small bit of web content wrapped up so they're easy to handle. You can add Gadgets to iGoogle, to your desktop or even within to your webpages.

MonAMI includes a framework that (amongst other things) extends Ganglia's default web front-end to include support for Gadgets (e.g. Glasgow's Torque monitoring).

So, with Google Gadgets, you can see your local batch system monitoring side-by-side with a per-VO view of what the Resource Brokers think your site is up to.