Performance statistics aggregation

[Benoit des Ligneris]

Hello,

We use heavily munin that is somehow very easy to deploy and scale
very well. Very comparable to Ganglia/CACTI.
Already packaged, very easy to automate deployment, large number of
plugins, RRD, very simple/no fuss/sysadmin-like
interface (http://munin-monitoring.org/). It supports various plugins
for virtualization/contextualization (KVM, OpenVZ, etc.)

The virtualization plugins are very useful : provides I/O disk,
Network, CPU, RAM per VM. Great help for bottleneck identification.


I used ganglia a lot on numerous HPC clusters. Some problem/issues as
mentioned with DNS, NAT and this kind of
funny real life server stufff. I'm not sure ganglia support any
virtualization technology. Not so helpful to optimize VM
operation and find bottleneck because of scare shared resources.


Collectd is great because compared to other tools, it has a smaller
footprint and, as a consequence, a time resolution that
is way better than comparable tools (10s per default for most of the C
plugins compared to minute/5 minutes resolution for others!).
 This is really a great help for capacity planning and bottleneck
analysis : you can have very detailed time series of relevant data.

In term of virtualization and contextualization, collectd is great :
It support interesting plugins like OpenVZ an Vserver
and It support libvirt (I know, not necessarily the panacea) in order
to gather Xen/Qemu/KVM statistics. It means that you
only need to deploy Collectd on your hosts and you will be able to
graph the basic vitals of all your VMs. Simplify simplify simplify.

It give you I/O, Network, CPU ... per VM. Very useful tool...

It only works for selected data however and for more advanced plugins,
you still need to deploy collectd on every instance.



This being said, I will not recommend ganglia because, AFAIK, it does
not support contextualization/virtualization.

Munin is very "sysadmin-like" : it produces static HTML pages, need a
very simple "presentation server" and provide
great data with very little effort and a minimal security risk.
Somehow Web 1.0 interface but very usable and OK for most sysadmins
;-)

Collectd has now a more evolved interface (including iPhone support I
think !) using Jquery and other fancy Web 2.0 technology
(http://kenny.belitzky.com/projects/collectd-web). It has the
advantage to provide more detailed statistical data than munin.
You can also store the statistical data in something else than RRD
and, as a consequence, keep the time precision intact (for instance
every 10s) at a cost (storage).

Ben


On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 11:02, Nicolas Barcet <nick.barcet at canonical.com> wrote:
> 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/
>
> Thoughts?
> Nick
>
>
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>



-- 
Benoit des Ligneris, Ph. D., CEO                 http://www.revolutionlinux.com/
Blog : Open Source catalyst
http://openceo.blogspot.com/
Large Scale Thin Client - Open Source VDI
http://ltsp-cluster.org/