Traditionally, support/development discussions for the Ganglia project happen in our various mailing-lists. However, some users may find web forums easier to use and dig through and that’s why we have created one for the project at http://forums.ganglia.info. Special thanks to Ganglia user Martin Ball for hosting the forum. Note, this does not mean we’re doing away with the mailing-lists as I would imagine most discussions will still happen there, but just trying to provide alternative ways for users to get help. And FYI, the mailing-lists are archived at Mail Archive and Gmane.

We have created three repositories on GitHub for centralizing user contributions which extends Ganglia: Gmetric: http://github.com/ganglia/gmetric Gmond Python DSO metric modules: http://github.com/ganglia/gmond_python_modules Other Ganglia contributions: http://github.com/ganglia/ganglia_contrib We have imported most of the gmetric scripts from http://ganglia.info/gmetric and there are now about 40+ contributions available. If you have written a gmetric script, python module, or other tools that extends the functionality of Ganglia and would like to contribute, please fork the corresponding repository, add your code in the appropriate directories and submit a pull request. For discussions on developing, using or contributing these plugins, please head over to our mailing-lists: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=43021 Thanks for your attention and happy plugins writing! – Ganglia Development Team

The Ganglia Project (http://ganglia.info) is pleased to announce the official release of Ganglia 3.1.7 The official tarball is available for immediate download at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganglia/files/ganglia%20monitoring%20core/3.1.7/ For a full description of the bug fixes and enhancements that are included in the 3.1.7 release as well as upgrade information, please see the current release notes at: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ganglia/wiki/ganglia_release_notes Supported platforms:

• Linux (Fedora/RedHat/CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, SuSE/OpenSuSE)
• [Open]Solaris
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• DragonflyBSD
• Cygwin (no support for DSO yet)
• AIX (initial support for DSO now available - please provide feedback)

Please read all the README, INSTALL and other available documentation (http://wiki.ganglia.info) as a lot of things have changed since version 3.0. Use good deployment practices when upgrading from 3.0.x to make sure that you do not mix gmond 3.0 and 3.1 nodes in the same cluster (as defined by a multicast address or unicast collector node). The protocol that allows gmond nodes to communicate within the same cluster, has changed. However the XML packets that are passed between gmond and gmetad have remained compatible from 3.0.x to 3.1.x, allowing a 3.1.x gmetad to continue to pull data from an older 3.0.x gmond cluster. Ganglia Development Team [Update: Initial support for DSO is available on AIX]

For those who don’t know, I joined Cloudera in January of this year. One of my first projects was to help create an Apache 2.0 licensed distribution of Apache Hadoop that is easy-to-install and stable. If you’re interested in running Hadoop on your cluster, you should take a moment to read my recent Cloudera blog post on our latest release. I’m thrilled to be working for a company that values open-source software. I’m also a committer on the Apache Avro project, where I’m working on the C implementation of the Avro marshalling/RPC protocol. Avro has great promise as a replacement for our current XDR/XML schemas. More on that in a later post. For all the ganglia users out there that run Hadoop on their clusters and want to go to Hadoop World 2009, I’ve got a special discount code for you. Just use the discount code hadoopworld_friend_cloudera_ganglia when you register and you’ll immediately get 50% off the cost of registration (a drop from from $299 to $149.50). This discount code expires September 21st so don’t wait too long to register. I want the ganglia community to have a chance to be strongly represented at Hadoop World. Hadoop World 2009 will be in New York on October 2nd, 2009. I invite you to come learn about what the following companies have done with Hadoop: About.com, Booz Allen Hamilton, China Mobile, ContextWeb, eBay, Facebook, IBM, Intel, JPMC, Microsoft, The New York Times, NexR, Rackspace, Vertica, Visa, Visible Measures, Yale, and Yahoo! If you have ever wondered what Hadoop might be able to do for you, this is your chance to learn both from leaders in the webspace and within your own industry.

When I updated the look of the ganglia website, I couldn’t help but feel a bit nostalgic looking through the old posts and pages. I joined the UC, Berkeley CS Dept. back in 1999 and, after couple of internal prototypes, released ganglia on SourceForge in 2000. Since its release, we built quite a team around ganglia and I’m proud of our accomplishments. We’ve created software that people have relied on to monitor their infrastructure for nine years running. Even though ganglia is a bit of a niche product targeting clusters and Grids, it’s still been downloaded over a million times. For fun, I decided to visualize the history of ganglia using a code_swarm from June 19th, 2002 to present (btw, June 19th was the day we moved from cvs to subversion). Please keep in mind that this video only highlights the activity of ganglia committers but we’ve had so much help along the way. Many times, committers are checking in patches submitted by one of the scores of volunteers that have enriched our software over the years. Sit back and enjoy the fireworks! May there be many more sparks to come.

Apache Hadoop is an open-source implementation of MapReduce. Hadoop users will be happy to know that Hadoop has built-in support for publishing run-time metrics using Ganglia. For more details, visit the GangliaContext page on the Hadoop Wiki or Philip Zeyliger’s blog post on the Cloudera blog. Cloudera offers an Apache 2.0 licensed distribution to make managing Hadoop clusters easier.

The Ganglia Project (http://ganglia.info) is pleased to announce the official release of Ganglia 3.1.2  The official tarball is available for immediate download at: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=43021&package_id=35280&release_id=661845 For a full description of the bug fixes and enhancements that are included in the 3.1.2 release as well as upgrade information, please see the current release notes at: http://ganglia.wiki.sourceforge.net/ganglia_release_notes Supported platforms:

• Linux (Fedora/RedHat/CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, SuSE/OpenSuSE)
• [Open]Solaris
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• DragonflyBSD
• Cygwin (no support for DSO yet)
• AIX (no support for DSO yet)

Please read all the README, INSTALL and other available documentation (http://ganglia.wiki.sourceforge.net) as a lot of things have changed since version 3.0. Use good deployment practices when upgrading from 3.0.x to make sure that you do not mix gmond 3.0 and 3.1 nodes in the same cluster (as defined by a multicast address or unicast collector node).  The protocol that allows gmond nodes to communicate within the same cluster, has changed.  However the XML packets that are passed between gmond and gmetad have remained compatible from 3.0.x to 3.1.x, allowing a 3.1.x gmetad to continue to pull data from an older 3.0.x gmond cluster. Ganglia Development Team

The Ganglia Project (http://ganglia.info) is pleased to announce the official release of Ganglia 3.1.1  The official tarball is available for immediate download at: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=43021&package_id=35280&release_id=625044 For a full description of the bug fixes and enhancements that are included in the 3.1.1 release as well as upgrade information, please see the current release notes at: http://ganglia.wiki.sourceforge.net/ganglia_release_notes Supported platforms:

• Linux (Fedora/RedHat/CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, SuSE/OpenSuSE)
• [Open]Solaris
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• DragonflyBSD
• Cygwin (no support for DSO yet)
• AIX (no support for DSO yet)

Please read all the README, INSTALL and other available documentation (http://ganglia.wiki.sourceforge.net) as a lot of things have changed since version 3.0. Use good deployment practices when upgrading from 3.0 to make sure that you do not mix gmond 3.0 and 3.1 nodes in the same cluster (as defined by a multicast address or unicast collector node).  The protocol that allows gmond nodes to communicate within the same cluster, has changed.  However the XML packets that are passed between gmond and gmetad have remained compatible from 3.0.x to 3.1.x, allowing a 3.1.x gmetad to continue to pull data from an older 3.0.x gmond cluster. Ganglia Development Team

The Ganglia Project (http://ganglia.info) is pleased to announce the first official release of Ganglia 3.1.0 The official tarball is available for immediate download at: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=43021&package_id=35280&release_id=616721 Please refer to http://ganglia.wiki.sourceforge.net/ganglia_release_notes for more information. (There is a known bug with 3.1.0 gmetad aggregating XML data from another 3.1.0 gmetad – if your environment requires this feature, wait for 3.1.1 to be released. Alternatively, a patch has been developed and is available here) The main features of this release are:

• Introduction of a modular metric interface for C and Python (DSO support)
• Scriptable metric module support with Python
• All pre-existing metrics (CPU, network, disk, memory, etc.) converted to metric modules
• Introduction of new metric modules multicpu, multidisk and tcp_conn status
• Modular frontend graph support
• Metric groups which can be viewed or hidden as desired
• Additional scaling capacity for systems with memory greater than 4TB
• Platform support for DragonFlyBSD
• Improved native metric support for Windows (Built with CygWin)
• Bug fixes and Enhancements

Supported platforms:

• Linux (Fedora/RedHat/CentOS, Debian, Gentoo, SuSE/OpenSuSE)
• [Open]Solaris
• FreeBSD
• NetBSD
• OpenBSD
• DragonflyBSD
• Cygwin (no support for DSO yet)
• AIX (no support for DSO yet)

Please read all the README, INSTALL and other available documentation (http://ganglia.wiki.sourceforge.net) as a lot of things have changed since 3.0.7. Use good deployment practices when upgrading from 3.0.x to make sure that you do not mix gmond 3.0 and 3.1 nodes in the same cluster (as defined by a multicast address or unicast collector node). The protocol that allows gmond nodes to communicate within the same cluster, has changed. However the XML packets that are passed between gmond and gmetad have remained compatible from 3.0.x to 3.1.x, allowing a 3.0.x gmetad to continue to pull data from a newer 3.1.x gmond cluster. For those who are interested in upgrading from a 3.0.x installation, your current gmond and gmetad configuration files will need to be moved from their current location to /etc/ganglia. If you are attempting the upgrade via an RPM, the RPM will automatically move your current configuration file to the new location. However, for gmond, the 3.0.x conf file will not work. Please use the patch file gmond-3.1.patch available at http://www.ganglia.info/releases/ to patch your gmond.conf prior to starting, otherwise gmond will fail to startup. There are several known issues with the current release which include the following:

• no support for C++ to create DSO modules
• no spoofing from modular metrics (use gmetric if spoofing is needed)
• race condition for tcpconn python metric module (affects gmond -m)
• libdir issues related to building for 64bit platforms
• known build issues for platforms:
  • Darwin (AKA MacOS/X)
  • HPUX
  • Tru64 (AKA OSF/1)
  • Irix

Many of the above issues are being addressed and patches will be applied for the next minor release of Ganglia 3.1.x. In addition more information about the current official release, can be found on the Ganglia wiki at http://ganglia.wiki.sourceforge.net/ganglia_release_notes. Ganglia Development Team

The Ganglia development team is pleased to announce the release of Ganglia 3.0.7 (Fossett) which is available for immediate download from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=43021&package_id=35280&release_id=580140 This is a bugfix release which fixes bugs that were introduced in 3.0.6 as well as memory leaks in gmond. Summary of bugfixes in 3.0.7:

• [web] Host view metric graphs’ “now (x.xx)” number is always 0.00

• [web] “Show Hosts” toggled did not work

• [gmond] Fix memory leak from network metrics on Linux (thanks Kumar Vaibhav for reporting)

• [gmond] Fix spoof memory leak (thanks Martin Hicks for the patch)