Ganglia

What Ganglia is

Ganglia is free, self-hosted monitoring software for high-performance computing clusters and Grids. Its hierarchical design monitors nodes within clusters and aggregates information across federations of clusters. The multithreaded gmond daemon runs on each node to monitor host state. Gmetad polls data sources, stores numeric volatile metrics in round-robin databases, and exports aggregated XML to clients. A PHP web frontend displays live monitoring data and historical graphs for CPU, memory, disk, and network use. The gmetric command-line tool can announce arbitrary host metrics, and gmond supports metric modules written in C or Python. Ganglia uses XML for data representation, XDR for transport, and RRDtool for storage and visualization. Its components include gmond, gmetad, and the web frontend. The frontend depends on gmetad; enabling gmetad requires RRDtool and is not the default build. For large data displays, the documentation recommends a fairly powerful dedicated machine. The project site warned that a Ganglia Web security issue could allow arbitrary script execution with web-user privileges, and advised upgrading or password-protecting publicly accessible installations.