The Ganglia Development Team is pleased to announce the release of Ganglia 3.0.0 (Kittyhawk) which is available for immediate download from http://ganglia.info/downloads.php and features…

Windows Support

Ganglia now runs on Windows. There is support for all standard metrics except for disk_free, disk_total, max_part_used and cpu_num (support will be added in future releases).

We have also created a windows installer which allows you to easily add the ganglia monitoring service to any Windows NT/2000/XP machine.

Currently, you are required to use unicast messaging since there is no support for multicast on windows at this time (although multicast support will be added in the future).

Special thanks to Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belon for providing metric code which makes native windows calls to collect the majority of metrics.

Unicast Support

Ganglia now allows you to send status messages over unicast routes instead of a single multicast channels. This capability gives you greater flexibility in building your monitoring overlay and allows ganglia to run on networks that are not multicast-enabled.

Moreover, you can specify as many unicast and multicast channels as you like. Whenever a message is sent each and every channel will receive the message. This feature gives you much more power in grouping machines.

Gmetric commandline tool parses the configuration file

Gmetric now parses the gmond configuration file and sends metric information to all unicast and multicast udp channels specified.

Apache Portable Runtime library

The Apache Portable Runtime (APR) library is the library underlying the Apache web server which provide memory pools, networking io, hash tables and arrays in a very portable manner. APR now serves as the heart of the new ganglia monitoring daemon to expand portability, improve reliability and provide new features like IPv6 address support.

More powerful and flexible configuration

The configuration file for gmond has changed. This change was necessary to provide you with a more flexible and powerful framework in which to configure gmond. There is a man page for gmond.conf (see man gmond.conf) which explains the new format.

To convert an old 2.5.x configuration file to the new format simply run

  % gmond --convert old.conf > new.conf

This new format allows you to specify multiple unicast and multicast channels to send and receive monitoring information, provides much more flexible access control lists, and allows you the power to specify exactly what metric you want to collect on each machine.

Special thanks to the developers of confuse (http://www.nongnu.org/confuse/) for building such a great file parser.

Configuration analysis gives bandwidth usage

There is a new option for gmond which allows you to get an estimate of the bandwidth that gmond will use given a particular configuration.

  % ./gmond -b /etc/gmond.conf
  7.945789 bytes/sec

This feature allows you to budget how much bandwidth you will use for monitoring your machines for a given configuration (see man gmond.conf).

More powerful Access Control mechanism

In the old 2.5.x world, the only access control mechanism available was a list of trusted_hosts.

Ganglia now supports very elaborate access control lists that allow you to specify an ip and mask (for filtering subnets) and outline the default policy (see man gmond.conf for details).

You have complete control over metric collection

The new configuration file format allows you to specify exactly which metrics are collected. You can also specify custom time and value thresholds per metric at runtime instead of needing to modify source at compile time. This flexibility will allow us to easily add alert mechanism in the near future.

RPM names were renamed on Linux

The RPM names have been renamed to make them simpler

  ganglia-monitor-core-gmond    =>   ganglia-gmond
  ganglia-monitor-core-gmetad   =>   ganglia-gmetad
  ganglia-monitor-core-lib      =>   ganglia-devel
  ganglia-webfrontend           =>   ganglia-web

Major cleanup of ganglia-devel

Lots of unnecessary headers where removed from libganglia and a ganglia-config script was added for application that link against ganglia (see ganglia-config –help for details).

ganglia-devel now installs only the following files

  /usr/bin/ganglia-config
  /usr/include/ganglia.h
  /usr/lib/libganglia.a
  /usr/lib/libganglia.la
  /usr/lib/libganglia.so

Solaris gmond doesn’t have to be run as root anymore

Special thanks to Adeyemi Adesanya for switching the Solaris metric gathering code from kvm to kstat, eliminating the need to run gmond as root. Gmond on Solaris can now setuid to any user that you like (see man gmond.conf for details).

Mixing different OSes on same channel is okay now

There was a bug in 2.5.x that caused Solaris and HPUX hosts to interpret metric data from other operating systems incorrectly. You can now mix any and all supported operating systems on a single communication channel with no problems.

Fixed the XML DTD

In certain circumstances, gmond would export invalid XML because of too restrictive of a DTD. The DTD has been updated to prevent this error.

Darwin metric collection greatly improved

Darwin now supports mem_total, bytes_in, bytes_out, pkts_in, pkts_out, proc_run, disk_total, disk_free and part_max_used metrics. Special thanks to Sebastian Hagedorn, Glen Beane, Joshua Durham, Eric Wages and Brian Peterson for their work on MacOS X.

Fixed bug that required Solaris systems to run in debug mode

Gmond wasn’t properly daemonizing on certain Solaris systems requiring that it be run in debug_mode with the output redirected to /dev/null. This bug no longer exists.

Fixed a memory leak on FreeBSD

Brooks Davis fixed a memory leak reported by Glen Beane in find_disk_space() and a potential memory leak in makenetvfslist(). General clean up of makenetvfslist().

All metric collection functions are in a standalone library

All the metric code has been moved to ./srclib/libmetrics in the ganglia distribution. Special Thanks to Martin Knoblauch for his hard work in cleaning up the metric collection code.

Potential memory leak fixed in gmetad

Marcelo Veiga Neves determined how a memory leak was possible for metrics sent via gmetric. Federico Sacerdoti applied a fix to prevent any leaks.

All web scripts are in the ./web directory of the distribution now

The PHP web scripts have been incorporated into the main ganglia distribution. Minor bug fixed added by Ramon Bastiaans and Jason Smith.

All communication protocols are now defined in ./lib/protocol.x

To help in integrating ganglia communications into other applications, all XDR communication formats are defined in ./lib/protocol.x. This XDR description file can be parsed by rpcgen, for example, to build XDR code for sending and receiving status messages.

Added a –foreground flag to gmond

Allows you to force gmond to run in the foreground.

Gmetad on Solaris bug fixed

David Wood fixed a bug creating directories on Solaris.

We have deployed a new bugzilla service at http://bugzilla.ganglia.info/. This site was created for you to submit bug reports, feature requests and upload patches for ganglia.

If you have found ganglia to be useful in your organization, please consider making a donation to the project at http://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id=43021

Thanks for using Ganglia!

The Ganglia Development Team