Distributed Monitoring Framework (DMF)

(A DOE National Collaboratories Project )

The goal of the Distributed Monitoring Framework is to improve end-to-end data throughput for data intensive applications in a high-speed WAN environments, and to provide the ability to do troubleshooting and performance analysis of Grid workflows. This monitoring framework will provide accurate, detailed, and adaptive monitoring of all of distributed computing components, including the network. Analysis tools will be able to use this monitoring data for real-time analysis, anomaly identification, and response.

Many of the components of the DMF have already been prototyped or implemented by the DIDC Group.  The NetLogger Toolkit  includes application sensors, some system and network sensors, a powerful event visualization tool, and a simple event archive. The Network characterization Service has proven to be a very useful hop-by-hop network sensor. Our work on the Global Grid Forum Grid Monitoring Architecture (GMA) addressed the event management system. The Enable project produced a simple network tuning advice service.

The main components of the DMF are instrumentation, sensors, sensor management, event publication, and event archiving.

• Instrumentation
• The ability to do precision, real-time instrumentation of Grid applications and middleware is essential to the process of developing high performance data intensive applications. DMF will include tools to make it easy to non-intrusively add instrumentation to Grid middleware, and to publish this event data in a standard manner. Our previous work on the NetLogger Toolkit will provide the basis for this component.

• Sensors
• Network and host sensors, combined with instrumented applications, allow one to do end-to-end performance analysis. The DMF will define standard schemas and publication mechanisms for this sensor data. In particular, we will focus on network sensors. Based on our work on the Network Characterization Service , the DMF will include non-intrusive network sensors capable of hop-by-hop network analysis. There are plenty of existing host sensors available, and a subset of these will be integrated into the DMF. Other network monitoring work such as the Net100 project, and the Self Configuring Network Monitor project, whose goal is to design and deploy a passive monitoring infrastructure, will also be integrated.
• We are working with the GGF Network Measurements Working Group to design a standard request and publication schema for network sensors.
  

• Event Publication
• To handle the potentially huge amounts of sensor event data requires a flexible, highly scalable event publication and subscription service. pyGMA, our implementation of the Grid Monitoring Architecture (GMA) is designed for this purpose.

• Event Archives
• The ability to archive event data is critical for performance analysis and tuning, as well as for accounting purposes. The archive must be extremely high performance and scalable to ensure that it does not become a bottleneck. Our initial work in this area is called netarchd .

The DMF framework is being used in the following projects:

·          Net100 Project

·          EU DataGrid

·          Particle Physics Data Grid

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