Chapter 18: Ganglia

Overview

The Ganglia software package provides a sophisticated mechanism for collecting and storing cluster node performance data, and it includes tools for displaying this data in a web browser.

Once your cluster goes into production, you'll use Ganglia's data visualization tools to watch the cluster manage and distribute its workload. This will help you to determine if there are any trends that indicate a load- balancing problem, a runaway process, or hardware under capacity. Historical graphs allow you to watch the cluster and see the daily, weekly, and even yearly demand for cluster services and hardware resources.

Note 

Ganglia requires very little CPU, memory, and network resources in order to run—even for clusters with more than 100 nodes.