Re: [Plastic-devs] Plastic and monitoring

[John T. <jd...@ro...>]

Hi Paul,
Thanks for your post, and apologies for the late reply. 
This looks interesting.   Norman has already pointed me at MonAMI and 
I'm interested in looking at it as a means for monitoring our services 
(even without the possible PLASTIC link-up).  Currently I'm using the 
MARS network monitor for this purpose (see http://vomon.sourceforge.net) 
but I'm keen to  explore alternatives, especially if they come from 
other grid projects.  [In fact, it's possible I will even have an MSc 
student to work on this area].  Maybe we should have a chat offlist 
about how we could get MonAMI to monitor our services at Edinburgh?

As for pushing out status reports via PLASTIC, currently plastic 
messaging is local to a user's machine.  Do you typically deploy MonAMI 
on a user's desktop or is it more a server-side application?  I guess 
it's more the latter, so PLASTIC in its present form isn't very useful 
to you.  However, it would be good to discuss how we might extend it to 
allow messaging between machines.

John

Paul Millar wrote:
> 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.
>   


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AstroGrid/VOTech
&
WFAU, Institute for Astronomy, Edinburgh
Skype:johndavidtaylor <skype:johndavidtaylor?chat>

------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Gratuitous advertising:*
Plastic - http://plastic.sourceforge.net | AstroRuntime - 
http://www2.astrogrid.org/desktop
AstroGrid - http://www.astrogrid.org | WFAU - 
http://www.roe.ac.uk/ifa/wfau/