Monitoring with Ganglia: Tracking Dynamic Host and Application Metrics at Scale

Written by Ganglia designers and maintainers, this book shows you how to collect and visualize metrics from clusters, grids, and cloud infrastructures at any scale. Want to track CPU utilization from 50,000 hosts every ten seconds? Ganglia is just the tool you need, once you know how its main components work together. This hands-on book helps experienced system administrators take advantage of Ganglia 3.x.

Learn how to extend the base set of metrics you collect, fetch current values, see aggregate views of metrics, and observe time-series trends in your data. You’ll also examine real-world case studies of Ganglia installs that feature challenging monitoring requirements.

• Determine whether Ganglia is a good fit for your environment
• Learn how Ganglia’s gmond and gmetad daemons build a metric collection overlay
• Plan for scalability early in your Ganglia deployment, with valuable tips and advice
• Take data visualization to a new level with gweb, Ganglia’s web frontend
• Write plugins to extend gmond’s metric-collection capability
• Troubleshoot issues you may encounter with a Ganglia installation
• Integrate Ganglia with the sFlow and Nagios monitoring systems

Contributors include: Robert Alexander, Jeff Buchbinder, Frederiko Costa, Alex Dean, Dave Josephsen, Peter Phaal, and Daniel Pocock. Case study writers include: John Allspaw, Ramon Bastiaans, Adam Compton, Andrew Dibble, and Jonah Horowitz.

Matt Massie open-sourced Ganglia in 2000 while working as a Staff Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He designed ganglia to monitor a shared computational grid of clusters distributed across the United States for scientific research. In 2010, he contributed a chapter on cluster monitoring for the O'Reilly book "Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time" by John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins. Matt is currently a software engineer at Cloudera focused on Apache Hadoop enterprise management and monitoring.

Bernard Li is a High Performance Computing (HPC) Systems Engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is currently one of the maintainers of the Ganglia project. He has been involved with HPC since 2003 and has worked on Open Source projects such as OSCAR, SystemImager and Warewulf.

Brad Nicholes is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and is currently working as a Consultant Software Engineer for NetIQ. In addition to being a committer on the Apache HTTPD and APR projects, Brad is also a developer as well as one of the administrators of the Ganglia project. As a developer on the Ganglia project, Brad developed and introduced the C/C++ and Python metric module interface into Gangla 3.1.x. He also developed and contributed several of the initial metric modules that currently ship with Ganglia. Brad attended school at the University of Utah and Brigham Young University and holds a degree in Computer Science.

Vladimir Vuksan (Broadcom) has worked in technical operations, systems engineering and software development for over 15 years. Prior to Broadcom he has worked at Mocospace, Rave Mobile Safety, Demandware, University of New Mexico implementing high availability solutions and building tools to make managing and running infrastructure easier.