Gweb 2.0
Ganglia has been around for over 10 years but it is surprising even to me that our Web Frontend has seen very little cosmetic changes over the years.
Back in October 2010, I started an email thread in the ganglia-developers mailing-list to kickstart a “re-write” of the frontend code. The idea is to make use of javascript libraries to improve on the user experience and allow customizations to cater to individual needs. We also wanted to tackle issues like visualizing a lot of data which large sites managing tens of thousands of computers are increasingly facing. These sites also tend to track upwards of hundreds of metrics per hosts bringing total metrics monitored in the range of millions.
These are indeed challenging and interesting times for the project as we see a shift in the user base from the traditional High Performance Computing and Grid sites to large web 2.0 companies and companies in the Cloud space where hosts are dynamically provisioned.
After months of coding, we have something to show. This is namely the effort of Vladimir Vuksan, Erik Kastner, John Goulah and Alex Dean. A demo of the new frontend can be seen here.
(Thanks Joyent for hosting and Andy Cobaugh from Penn State University, Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics for providing access to their gmond metrics data)
For more in-depth description about this work, you can read Vladimir’s blog posts:
http://vuksan.com/blog/2010/12/10/rethinking-ganglia-web-ui
http://vuksan.com/blog/2011/02/20/json-representation-for-graphs-in-ganglia
To play with the code, you can get it from GitHub.
We value your suggestions and feedback, so please don’t be shy and either tweet about it @gangliainfo, ping us on IRC #ganglia at irc.freenode.net or start an email thread at ganglia-developers mailing-list!
We would like to release this code soon to the public, but we need your help to implement additional features, test the code, etc. So if you are interested, please let us know!