Ganglia has released Ganglia 3.1. The solution is designed as a distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems and is expected to bring improved performance and greater configuration options to organizations such as the University of California, Flickr and Stanford Linear Accelerator.

 

Ganglia is an open-source project that grew out of the University of California, Berkeley Millennium Project, which was initially funded in large part by the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) and National Science Foundation.

 

Ganglia is said to be an important part of GroundWork’s solution offerings and also one of their most successful community partnerships.

 

GroundWork Open Source, Inc. deals in commercial open source network and systems management software, delivering enterprise-class network, system and application management solutions at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

 

Ganglia can attain very low per-node overhead and high concurrency and is designed for large monitoring environments. It is stated that Ganglia has been deployed on thousands of clusters worldwide and is able to monitor clusters as large as thousands of nodes, both as stand-alone system and as a component of a wide variety of software solutions.

 

“We use Ganglia for both capacity planning and problem identification purposes,” said John Allspaw, operations engineering manager at Flickr, a Yahoo! Inc. company and one of the world’s fastest growing online photo-sharing communities. "We use Ganglia to collect and record metrics on every host at Flickr, and it fits our architecture quite well. We have the ability to write new metrics quickly, and aggregate those across many clusters automatically.”

 

“Ganglia’s wide-spread adoption and its use in varied environments created significant demand for the new capabilities included in Ganglia 3.1,” said Brad Nicholes, Ganglia developer and senior software engineer at Novell (News - Alert). “As an enterprise monitoring solution as well as an open source project, adding a higher degree of flexibility that would support a broader set of monitored metrics, seemed like the right thing to do to move the Ganglia project to the next level."

 

The new version is updated with new metric features and a new modular interface and all pre-existing metrics (CPU, network, disk, memory, etc.) have been converted into pluggable modules, which can be selected a la carte, allowing for a tailored monitoring environment. The new metric features can accommodate extra info like metric groups, metric titles and descriptions, which can be displayed on the front-end view, or grouped and hidden as the user desires.

 

GroundWork Open Source has stated that they offer Ganglia Integration Module that enables GroundWork Monitor to provide multiple role status views, dashboards, reports, notifications and configuration tools for data collected and displayed by Ganglia.

 

Ganglia 3.1 will be available immediately and can be downloaded from http://ganglia.info/. The project, as well as documentation, project details and more, can also be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganglia/ and http://freshmeat.net/projects/ganglia/.