Speaker
Describe the activity, tool or service using or enhancing the EGEE infrastructure or results. A high-level description is needed here (Neither a detailed specialist report nor a list of references is required).
This contribution shows the strategies adopted by the LHC experiments to monitor the common and experiment-specific Grid services using the Service Availability Monitor (SAM) framework. We will also briefly describe the visualization of these services through GridMap, and to how these experiences could be applied to other EGEE VOs.
Report on the impact of the activity, tool or service. This should include a description of how grid technology enabled or enhanced the result, or how you have enabled or enhanced the infrastructure for other users.
This contribution describes the work done in the LHC experiments to improve the quality of the monitoring information.
Thanks to the flexibility of the SAM framework, different solutions have been adopted by the VOs to have a reliable overall view of their Grid resources. This information allows the VOs to make a better decision about
the resources they could use, by avoiding resources which show problems.
In this contribution, we report on the recent developments and the status of the SAM monitoring in each LHC VO. Moreover, we will briefly mention the interaction of the SAM framework with GridMap, the web tool to visualize the "status" of the Grid. The SAM results, collected from a wide range of probes and tests, has been successfully used to measure the performances of the Grid services during the last LHC computing challenge (CCRC'08) before the start of the LHC data taking, foreseen for the end of 2008.
Describe the added value of the grid for your activity, or the value your tool or service adds for other grid users. This should include the scale of the activity and of the potential user community, and the relevance for other scientific or business applications.
The Service Availability Monitor (SAM) has been developed within the EGEE project to monitor production and pre-production Grid sites and it is now used by all the LHC experiments.
SAM works by regularly running and publishing different tests on Grid services; these tests can involve very basic functionalities, or can be related to high level operations and real production activities. Their results are stored in a database to provide experts, users or people running computing operations, the possibility to visualize their historical trends. A new graphical user interface, based on a prototype developed for the CMS VO, is in development.
