Beta Update: Simplified and Automated Monitoring with Ganglia

2010/08/03

One of the big requests we've been getting was built-in monitoring. We already offer a certain amount of monitoring built-in, but it's not sufficient for a really big picture. With Chef cookbooks it's easy to set up your own monitoring using e.g. Munin, Ganglia, Nagios and the like. But since it was an often requested feature we decided to build it right into Scalarium to make integration into your clouds simple and seamless, with new nodes being added to the monitoring setup automatically.

Setting Ganglia up for your cloud is simple. Just add a new role to your cloud and select the "Ganglia Monitoring Master".

There's a couple of settings available. The Ganglia server will install Apache, and you can specify a mount point URL under which you'd like the Ganglia statistics to be available, and a password to protect the monitoring data from unauthorized access. The default username is scalarium, but can be changed in the Ganglia Settings once you've added the role. You can change username and password even after the instance was started, it'll be automatically reconfigured during the next deployment, or when the state of your cloud changes.

Add an instance to the role, and boot it up. New instances will now automatically be configured to report data to the master instance. There's a slight restriction for now: The server running Ganglia can't serve any other web applications. We're working on a fix for that, but you can simply promote e.g. your database server to be responsible for collection statistics.

Once setup is complete, and you've done at least one full deploy (if all of your instances were stopped before, the full state of your cloud wasn't known yet to the instances), the Ganglia statistics are available on the instance with the specified sub-URL (e.g. http://79.125.74.221/ganglia), where you can log in using the configured credentials.

Once you've logged in, you'll be greeted with something like this, a neat overview of CPU, memory and disk usage, and some statistics specific to instances of certain roles.

Sure, it's not a beauty, and we sure wish we could offer you something as good-looking as the Scalarium user interface, but it's still incredibly useful to get a single overview on what's happening in your cloud. We'll try to improve on the default layout for the Ganglia pages in the future, but really, it's more about getting an overview of the data and your cloud's status than getting eye candy.

Each role gets a specific set of Ganglia statistics, so you can see MySQL statistics, details on the HAProxy queue, or the size of your Memcached server. By choosing a node in that handy select box above the statistics you can get even more glorious statistical detail on a specific node.

Automated Ganglia setup is just one feature we've rolled out during the last weeks. Stay tuned for more!