We have been working hard on new Ganglia Web features that will be part of Ganglia Web 2.2.0. These are the highlights

Compare Hosts

Allows you to compare hosts across all the matching metrics (this can mean hundreds of graphs :-)). You supply a regular expression that matches a set of the hosts and Ganglia will aggregate all hosts for each metric. This is useful in those cases where you are trying to find why a particular host or hosts are performing differently then another set.

Built-in Nagios integration

This feature allows you to use your Ganglia trending data to alert in Nagios. There a couple nice addition to the basic check functionality e.g.

1. Check heartbeat - as you may know gmond daemons sends a periodic heartbeat (every 20 seconds by default). If the heartbeat is missing it is fair to assume host is down. This should avoid you from having to use things like check_ping and alert you to potential down time much quicker
2. Check multiple metrics - allows you to use a single check to multiple metrics on the same host ie. check that disk free on / is more than 30%, on /tmp more than 10% etc.
3. Check single metric across multiple hosts (not yet implemented) - use a single check to check low disk space on a set of hosts defined by a regular expression e.g. instead of having separate disk checks for every host you would have a single check that would give you a break down of hosts that were not OK.

If you want to peak at how basic check_metric alert works check out Ganglia Nagios integration wiki document.

Aggregate graphs decomposition

While viewing aggregate graphs with more than 6-7 items colors will start to blend together and it may be hard to distinguish what on graph is what. This feature allows you to decompose a graph by taking every item on the aggregate graph and putting it on a separate graph e.g. a graph like this will decompose into this

Flot client side rendering

We have been using flot a Javascript graphing library for a while now. In this release we are planning to make it even more interactive ie. take items of graph dynamically etc.

Utilization heatmaps

In this release we are turning on utilization heatmaps instead of the old style pie charts e.g. Most of the features have already been implemented. We are still polishing up the release and writing documentation. We could always use more help with testing and documenting things so if you are up to it please join us on Freenode channel #ganglia. If you’d like to test drive some of these changes please visit our demo site.