On-line Monitoring of Grid Applications using OCM-G

OCM-G (OMIS-Compliant Monitor for the Grid) is a system for on-line monitoring of Grid applications.

In the process of development of Grid applications, various tools are helpful in order to find bugs in the application (debuggers) or to examine if the application is performing well (performance analyzers). Such tools require a facility that allows to obtain the information about the running application or even to manipulate its behavior. This functionality is provided by the OCM-G Monitoring System.

Compared to other existing monitoring systems for Grid applications, the OCM-G provides some unique capabilities, like:

• Support for Grid applications running across multiple sites.
• Techniques for data rate reduction such as selective run-time instrumentation, local preprocessing, buffering, and profiling which ensure extremely low overhead and high responsiveness, enough even for monitoring of interactive applications.
• Services-driven rather than fixed-metrics-driven design: the OCM-G provides a large number of monitoring services which allow forflexible construction of a variety of performance metrics, rather than offering a limited set of metrics with fixed semantics.
• Extendibility: the OCM-G can be extended with additional services, loaded dynamically at run-time.
• Compact and secure design: the OCM-G runs as a set of user processes, which use a lightweight and fast socket-based communication mechanism. At the same time, state-of-the-art techniques are applied to ensure secure communication. No special privileges (special access rights, open ports on firewalls, or other potential security holes) are required.
• Designed as autonomous infrastructure exposing a standard interface OMIS (On-line Monitoring Interface Specification). The services of the OCM-G are available via this interface, which minimizes the effort of porting OMIS-based tools across platforms (basically only the OCM-G needs to be ported).
• The OCM-G is an autonomous service in the Grid, supporting the interoperability of multiple tools monitoring a single application.

Try it out!

If you have access to any EGEE-compatible grid infrastructure (like BalticGrid) you can see OCM-G in action. Just download this tutorial handout ( New version !!! ) (which was used during 1st BalticGrid Summer School) and follow the instructions presented in it. Remember to change virtual organization name from gilda to your_virtual_organization_name when necessary.