Performance statistics aggregation

[Mark Russell]

On 06/16/2011 04:37 PM, Clint Byrum wrote:
> Excerpts from Nicolas Barcet's message of Thu Jun 16 08:02:37 -0700 2011:
>> I think it would be good to have the server community's opinion on what
>> should be our preferred performance statistics aggregation solution in
>> Ubuntu.  The 2 main contenders would be ganglia [1] and collectd [2],
>> but something even better might be out there that I do not know about.
>>
>> [1] http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/
>> [2] http://collectd.org/
> 
> I still like collectd because it is focused heavily on making *collecting*
> the data easy, and de-couples itself from presenting the data.
> 
> That said, ganglia is pretty good for that as well.
> 
> This one is also pretty slick:
> 
> https://labs.omniti.com/labs/reconnoiter
> 
> Last I checked it was not in Debian or Ubuntu, so it should be packaged
> for sure.
> 
> I'm not sure we need to pick one.. right now munin is in main because its
> the one that was most respected at the time. It has lost favor because it
> really can't scale past 100 nodes, but that doesn't mean users aren't
> very well served by it.
> 

Ganglia's gmond, gmetad, and webfrontend are all separate packages.
There's no requirement to use the presentation layer, although it was
just recently been updated [1] (demo here[2] for those interested).

Some pro's for ganglia:  (super easy) hadoop metrics integration [3],
nagios integration [4], and I *believe* it is going have very good
OpenStack integration [5].

The main con I can see is that it's a bit of a pain in a cloud situation
because it uses reverse DNS lookups of the monitored host's IP in order
to name the hosts in the database.  That makes it difficult to have a
certain cloud server _role_ keep reporting to the same historical "node"
in your database.  I've asked their upstream about this and they sounded
very open to changing that.  It just needs to get implemented.

I can't add anything about collectd really, although it seems like the
best way to write plug-ins for it is C or Perl, while ganglia works
pretty easily with Python plugins (or even simpler with gmetric scripts).

HTH,

Mark

[1] http://ganglia.info/?p=373
[2] http://fjrkr5ab.joyent.us/ganglia-2.0/
[3] http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/GangliaMetrics
[4] http://vuksan.com/blog/2011/04/19/use-your-trending-data-for-alerting/
[5] https://code.launchpad.net/~devcamcar/nova/ganglia-stats

-- 
Mark Russell
Premium Service Engineer | Canonical, Ltd.
<mark.russell at canonical.com> | GPG: 4096R/B3BBA7D1

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