Monitoring with Ganglia

Chapter 4. The Ganglia Web Interface

Vladimir Vuksan

Alex Dean

So far, this book has dealt with the collection of data. Now we will discuss visualizing it. Visualization of these data is the primary responsibility of a web-based application known as gweb. This chapter is an introduction to gweb and its features. Whether the job is understanding how a problem began in your cluster or convincing management that more hardware is required, a picture is worth a thousand data points.

Navigating the Ganglia Web Interface

gweb is organizaed into a number of top-level tabs: Main, Search, Views, Aggregated Graphs, Compare Hosts, Events, Automatic Rotation, Live Dashboard, and Mobile. These tabs allow you to easily jump right to the information you need.

The gweb Main Tab

Figure 4-1. gweb navigation overview

gweb’s navigation scheme is organized around Ganglia’s core concepts: grids, clusters, and nodes. As you click deeper into the hierarchy, breadcrumb-style navigation links allow you to return to higher-level views. Figure 4-1 shows how you can easily navigate to exactly the view of the data you want.

Grid View

The grid view (Figure 4-2) provides the highest-level view available. Grid graphs summarize data across all hosts known to a single gmetad process. Grid view is the jumping-off point for navigating into more details displays dealing with individual clusters and the hosts that compose those ...