Ganglia 3.1 enables custom cluster, grid monitoring

Ganglia, community partner to GroundWork Open Source, releases cluster monitoring product Ganglia 3.1 at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this week in San Francisco. Ganglia is a distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. The central feature of Gangila 3.1 is that it allows administrators to create customized “metric modules.” Admins can create a module from metrics for CPU, network, disk and memory that they select à la carte, allowing for a tailored monitoring environment.

“I would hope that [Ganglia 3.1] changes business practices for the better, making clusters easier to use and more expandable,” said Ganglia developer Brad Nicholes. “We want to make sure that whoever needs to monitor data has the resources they need to do so.”

Previously, an administrator could create a metric module but could not integrate it into the Ganglia interface.Ganglia 3.1 allows an administrator to expand a cluster by adding custom metric modules on an as-needed basis. Ganglia 3.1 uses the round-robin scheduling algorithm, which enables admins to tailor the collected data to company’s needs.

Nicholes noted that it is important to upgrade all gmon agents, tools which allow a GUI to “talk” to the various components of a cluster, at the same time.

If you would like to use Ganglia with GroundWork Open Source’s GroundWork Monitor, GroundWork offers a Ganglia Integration Module that allows Monitor to provide multiple role status views, dashboards, reports, notifications and configuration tools.