Ganglia

Ganglia is a monitoring system designed from the ground up for scalability and interoperability: it uses carefully engineered data structures and algorithms to achieve very low per-node overheads and high concurrency. Initially designed for large-scale computing environments such as clusters and grids, it's appropriate for many small-and-mid sized sites as well. Ganglia leverages widely used technologies such as XML for data representation, XDR for compact, portable data transport, and RRDtool for data storage and visualization.

• Watch the Grid & Cluster Management with Ganglia webcast.

Why do we love Ganglia?

• Ganglia is used world-wide by major corporations and academic institutions in mission-critical deployments.
• It's highly scalable: initially designed for grid and cluster monitoring, it can handle more nodes and devices than any other monitoring tool.
• It installs quickly, even automatically, on multiple machines. Changes are easily propagated.
• It's available for a wide range of devices and a wide range of operating systems.

How does Ganglia work?

Ganglia works through a small agent, gmond, on each node or machine to be monitored. If you have lots of identical machines to monitor you can distribute a single gmond instance to lots of machines at once. Gmonds communicate the state of their local node to a machine running a Master gmetad instance.

How is Ganglia different than Nagios*®?

Ganglia is architecturally designed to perform efficiently in very large monitoring environments: each Ganglia gmond performs its service checks locally, reporting in at a regular interval to the gmetad. Nagios performs its service checks by polling each device across a network connection and waiting for a response (known as "active checks"), which can be more resource and bandwidth intensive.

Nagios uses the results of its active checks to determine state by comparing the metrics it polls to thresholds. These state changes can in turn be used to generate notifications and customizable corrective actions. Ganglia, by contrast, has no built-in thresholds, and so does not generate events or notifications.

The general rule of thumb has been: if you need to monitor a limited number of aspects of a large number of identical devices, use Ganglia; if you want to monitor lots of aspects of a smaller number of different devices, use Nagios. But those distinctions are blurring as Ganglia supports more and more devices, and as Nagios' scalability improves.

Choose Ganglia, Nagios, or Both

GroundWork offers you the flexibility to choose either Ganglia or Nagios, or to even combine them in a hybrid solution. We've even created a Ganglia-to-Nagios plugin and an associated thresholding system.

GroundWork can set up a comprehensive Ganglia-based IT Monitoring Solution for you, capable of monitoring from ten to tens of thousands of hosts!

Email us at [email protected] to find out more!

Download
the Open Source Ganglia-to-GroundWork Integration Module

The GroundWork to Ganglia Integration Module integrates Ganglia with other popular open-source tools through GroundWork Monitor. It contains all the elements to feed Ganglia events into the operator views, dashboards reports, notifications and configuration tools of GroundWork, alongside the output of Nagios, RRDtool, Cacti, etc., and to leverage those tools to enhance the functionality of your IT monitoring and overall visibility of your systems. Download it here.

* Nagios is a registered trademark of Nagios Enterprises