Speaker
Dr
Paul Millar
(GridPP)
Description
Computing resources in HEP are increasingly delivered utilising grid
technologies, which presents new challenges in terms of monitoring.
Monitoring involves the flow of information between different
communities: the various resource-providers and the different user
communities. The challenge is providing information so everyone can
find what they need: from the local site administrators, regional
operational centres through to end-users.
To meet this challenge, MonAMI was developed. MonAMI aims to be a
universal sensor framework with a plugin architecture. This plugin
structure allows flexibility in what is monitored and how the gathered
information is reported. MonAMI supports gathering statistics from
services like MySQL and Apache. The gathered data can be sent to many
monitoring systems, including Ganglia, Nagios, MonaLisa and R-GMA.
This flexibility allows MonAMI to be plumbed into whatever monitoring
system is being used. This avoids the current duplication of sensors,
allowing gathered statistics to be presented within a greater
diversity of monitoring systems.
Using the MonAMI framework, sensors have been developed for the DPM
and dCache storage systems, both common at HEP grid centres. The
development of these tools specifically to tackle the challenges of
high availability storage is described. We illustrate how MonAMI's
architecture allows a single sensor to both deliver long term trend
information and to trigger alarms in abnormal conditions.
The use of MonAMI within the ScotGrid distributed Tier-2 is examined
as a case study, illustrating both the ease with which MonAMI
integrates into existing systems and helps provide a framework for
extending monitoring where necessary.
