Monitoring & Management service over distributed environments

Abstract

Monitoring resources is an important aspect of the overall efficient usage and control of any distributed system. The resources of interest can include all manner of networked devices, from a remote sensor or satellite feed through to a computational node or a communications link. This generic, open-source resource monitoring architecture has been specifically designed for the Grid being an ultimate implementation yet defined for distributed architecture. A widearea distributed system such as a Grid requires that a broad range of data be monitored and collected for a variety of tasks such as fault detection and performance monitoring, analysis, prediction and tuning. A range of tools has been developed for monitoring distributed resources. The system is based on the basics of Services Oriented Architecture, Java technologies (jini, applets, servlets and JDBC) a SQL database and SNMP (agents and objects). Unlike many other monitoring systems, it is designed to monitor both Grid resources and processes, rather than only the applications that execute on a Grid. It is capable of registering interest in events, remotely observing devices, as well as gathering and displaying monitoring data.