[Plastic-devs] Plastic and monitoring

[Paul M. <p.m...@ph...>]

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Hi all,

By way of introduction, I'm currently looking at monitoring.  In particular,
at developing a "universal" sensor for grid applications.  This is primarily
within High-energy grid community but I hope this has uses further afield.

The focus is in developing code to support plugin-based monitoring: both in
terms of what is monitored and where the information is sent.  The result is
the MonAMI project:
  http://monami.sourceforge.net/

The idea behind MonAMI is that services (such as new grid services) that are
to be monitored provide this functionality as a plug-in for MonAMI.  MonAMI
can be configured to route this information to wherever its needed using
whatever plugins exist and have been configured (e.g. ganglia, nagios, ...).
This allows local site-administrators to integrate grid-service monitoring
within their existing fabric monitoring.

A college (working for the VOTech project) mentioned plastic as a means for
inter-communications.  Looking at the aims for plastic, I think it might be
of use as a transport for monitoring information.  Implement a plastic
plug-in for MonAMI looks to be fairly straight-forward.  Such a plug-in would
allow MonAMI to send data to the hub for relaying to whoever is registered
with the hub.  This would happen independently of other monitoring activity
(such as updating ganglia graphs).

MonAMI intrinsically supports periodic pushing of data, on-demand monitoring
(in this case, triggered by other plastic clients) and event-based
asynchronous monitoring.  With a suitable set of plastic monitoring messages,
it should be possible to support all these monitoring flows, although perhaps
not all are necessary here.

I don't know if others are looking at providing monitoring via plastic, or if
other mechanisms exist, but this might be worth looking into.

Cheers,

Paul.