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Description
ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is preparing for a major upgrade of the detector, readout system and computing for LHC Run 3. A new facility called O2 (Online-Offline) will play a major role in data compression and event processing. To efficiently operate the experiment, we are designing a monitoring subsystem, which will provide a complete overview of the O2 overall health, detect performance degradation and component failures. The monitoring subsystem will receive and collect up to 600 kHz of performance parameters. It consists of a custom monitoring library and a server-side, distributed software covering five main functional tasks: parameter collection and processing, storage, visualization and alarms.
To select the most appropriate tools for these tasks, we evaluated three server-side systems: MonALISA, Zabbix and “Modular stack”. The latter one consists of a toolkit including collectd, Apache Flume, Apache Spark, InfluxDB, Grafana and Riemann.
This paper describes the monitoring subsystem functional architecture. It goes through a complete evaluation of the three considered solutions, the selection processes, risk assessment and justification for the final decision. The in-depth comparison includes functional features, latency and throughput measurement to ensure the required processing and storage performance.
