Cluster monitoring at NCSA
T. Roney · 2001
System monitoring and performance monitoring at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications have always been treated as separate arenas, due to the nature of their different functions. The function of a system monitor has been that of a virtual system operator, monitoring for events that depict a system fault and also automating the management of such events. The function of a performance monitor has been to collect data from different layers of the system -- hardware, kernel, service, and application layers -- for administrators and users who collect such data for diagnostic purposes in order to finely tune the performance of the different system layers. The collected performance data has never been associated with the system-monitoring framework. However, the legacy of this division of interest dissolves within the new arena of cluster monitoring. This paper explains why this is so, and how the National Center for Supercomputing Applications has merged the arenas of system monitoring and performance monitoring in a cluster environment.