Archive for category Releases

Ganglia 3.0.0 Released!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on February 7, 2005

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

,

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ganglia-python 3.3.0 released

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on October 14, 2004

Dear Ganglia Developers and Users,

This second announcement is for an updated ganglia-python package in Ganglia. This represents code from the latest Rocks release which has shown itself to be useful to the greater Ganglia audience.

Ganglia Python 3.3.0

  • From Rocks 3.3.0 release. Various improvements, including new command line options to see only dead nodes.
  • New addition of Ganglia-news RSS cooker. This tool generates an RSS stream for a ganglia cluster, notifying about dead nodes, etc.
  • Please see the release notes at
    for more information on using the ganglia-news RSS system    .

Enjoy!

Federico
Rocks Cluster Group, San Diego Supercomputer Center, CA

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2.5.7 Released!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on October 14, 2004

Dear Ganglia Developers and Users,

We are pleased to announce the release of Ganglia 2.5.7. This is a minor feature enhancement to the monitor core and webfrontend. If you are a US citizen, this is your tax dollars hard at work :) Ganglia is free for download at ganglia.sf.net.

Ganglia Monitor Core 2.5.7

  • New gmetad cleanup thread prevents metric explosion in certain cases.
  • Gmetad presents a more accurate “TN” in xml.

Ganglia Webfrontend 2.5.7

  • Cleaner static metrics in host view
  • Interface refinements: GB units in phys view
  • New host gmetric view

Enjoy!

The Ganglia Management Team

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2.5.6 Released!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on February 3, 2004

The Ganglia Development Team is please to announce the release of ganglia 2.5.6.

To download this new release, please visit the ganglia download page.

Changes (see ChangeLog for details):

* The host dmax attribute is now honored allowing you to specify a timeout for dead nodes. See the host_dmax attribute in ./gmond/gmond.conf for details. [Federico Sacerdoti]
* Ganglia will now compile on 64-bit versions of FreeBSD [Brooks Davis]
* A bug has been fixed which caused nodes to falsely be marked as dead because of bogus TN attribute values. [Matt Massie]
* An RPM dependency on librrd has been removed making installation and maintenance simpler. [Matt Massie]

Thank you for using Ganglia!
-The Ganglia Development Team

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2.5.5 Released!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on November 7, 2003

Changes (see ChangeLog for details):

* FreeBSD users will be happy to know that all standard metrics are now reported on FreeBSD thanks to the work of Brooks Davis.
* This release also fixes a bug brought to our attention by Jim Prewett. This bug in gmond allows a specially crafted UDP packet to crash all gmond on a multicast channel with a segfault. This special UDP packet cannot be created using gmetric but requires a custom piece of code or a fuzzer.
* The ganglia documentation is now included in the distribution as ganglia.html and README. We are working to make sure the documentation is simpler to use, up-to-date and directly answers the questions that you have about ganglia.

Thank you for using Ganglia!

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2.5.4 Released!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on August 8, 2003

the ganglia development team is pleased to announce the release of ganglia 2.5.4.

[Download Page]

the largest improvements in this release are the result of the hard work of federico sacerdoti. he has modified gmetad to be interactive allowing for efficient primitive subtree queries of the xml tree. the web frontend has been updated to work with the interactive gmetad so you will notice very significant speed improvements when loading ganglia web pages. gmetad has also been improved to handle clusters with varying clocks (the graph timescales are no longer locked).

the time and value thresholds for the gmond network monitors have been increased to prevent unnecessary network traffic. (ironic isn’t it?).

martin knoblauch has also made ganglia more stable and correct on irix.

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ganglia 2.5.3 released!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on March 7, 2003

this is primarily a bugfix release

steve wagner submitted a patch that vastly improved the efficiency of gmetad. previously, a gettimeofday() call was made for every round-robin database updated whereas gmetad 2.5.3 doesn’t require any gettimeofday() calls. time is gathered from the XML. this may help users who experience gaps in their gmetad images.

federico sacerdoti and tomas ogren (stric) tracked down a serious bug in gmond that could lead to stack corruption for long metric names (>32 characters). federico also made the cleanup thread more efficient and fixed a bug which prevented expired metrics from being deleted.

martin knoblauch and jack perdue provided code to strengthen HPUX support.

phil radden fixed a bug on linux which caused bytes_in and bytes_out to occasionally be incorrectly reported.

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libganglia-ruby created!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on November 25, 2002

Ruby developers will be happy to know that there is now a Ganglia Ruby library thanks to Yasuhito TAKAMIYA!

From: Yasuhito TAKAMIYA
To: ganglia-developers@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Ganglia-developers] libganglia-ruby released

Hi ganglia developers,

I released libganglia-ruby, a ruby wrapper to libganglia.

Downloadable from (viewcvs):
http://plateau.is.titech.ac.jp/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/libganglia-ruby/

RAA (Ruby Application Archive) libganglia-ruby page:
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/raa-list.rhtml?id=724

thanks,
–
yasuhito

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Ganglia 2.5.1 Released!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on November 8, 2002

The Ganglia Development Team is pleased to announce the release of Ganglia 2.5.1! To download this release now, tune your web browser to http://ganglia.sourceforge.net/downloads.php
Ganglia has added HPUX and MacOS X to the family of operating systems that ganglia supports. HPUX support has been brought to you through the efforts of Martin Knoblauch. MacOS X users have Preston Smith to thank for the MacOS X port.

Ganglia now runs on Linux (i386, ia64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, m68k, mips, arm, hppa, s390), Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX, IRIX, Tru64, HPUX, MacOS X and Windows (cygwin beta).
A great new feature added by Federico Sacerdoti in 2.5.1 is the ability to set the useful life of metrics with gmetric. A cleanup thread in gmond now periodically deletes expired metrics. This is very helpful for metrics which have a fixed lifetime such as processes and batch queue data.

For example, running…

gmetric –name=foo –value=2 –type=int32 –dmax=60

would sent the metric “foo” to all gmond on the multicast channel and mark the metric for deletion in 60 seconds (however resending the metric during this 60 second interval will reset the counter).
Leif Nixon also fixed a bug which caused gmond to crash occasionally when remote client prematurely closed connection.

We hope you enjoy Ganglia 2.5.1 and encourage feedback, patch and bug reports.

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Ganglia 2.5.0 is Released!!

Posted by Matt Massie in Releases on September 20, 2002

The Ganglia Development Team is happy to announce the release of ganglia 2.5.0! This latest release has been in the works for over two and a half months with input and work from dozens of open source developers.

Ganglia Now Delivers

* The Ganglia Meta Daemon (gmetad) is now written in C and part of the monitoring core distribution and:
o is multithreaded and asynchronous so transient data source failures have no effect on other data sources
o uses gperf perfect hash algorithms to dramatically increase the efficiency of parsing XML and storing data (vastly superior to the perl gmetad)
o works with both 2.5.0 and pre-2.5.0 data sources
o much more simple and standard installation
* The PHP webfrontend has been updated
o a new “physical view” allows you to organize your cluster display to match each host to the appropriate rack location
o automatically separates constant metrics from volatile metrics on the host detail page
o allows you to click a single hyperlink and see if a newer version of your web frontend and backend (gmetad) are available
o supports sorting by hostname
* The ganglia XML has been enriched to export more critical information
o a new SLOPE attribute (which can be set to either “zero”, “positive”, “negative”, or “both”) allows gmetad and the PHP webfrontend to efficiently separate constant data metrics from volatile ones. the SLOPE attribute will also allow gmetad to store data in round-robin databases in two formats: GAUGE or COUNTER
o new TN (time now) and TMAX (timeout) allow for per-metric live/stale determination
o the DTD has been relaxed to allow for HOSTS with no METRICS for installations which only want heartbeat data
o a LATLONG tag allows you to identify the latitude and longitude of each of your data sources for GPS mapping
* Complete rewrite of underlying network library by incorporating the best that libdnet [http://libdnet.sourceforge.net/] and gnet [http://www.gnetlibrary.org/] have to offer into the ganglia source.
o fixes bug and limitations with the old underlying network functions
o will allow for interface autodiscovery and multiple interface processing and multicast forwarding in future releases
* Ganglia has been ported to even more platforms: Linux (i386, ia64, sparc, alpha, powerpc, m68k, mips, arm, hppa, s390), Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX, IRIX, Tru64 and Windows (early beta on cygwin available soon).
o eight new metrics have been added to Linux to allowing monitoring of disk and network activity
o Solaris support has been dramatically increased with full support for all metrics and the addition of nine new Solaris-specific measures.

Thanks

I would like to thank the developers on the Ganglia Development Team for their hard work. Ganglia 2.5.0 would not have been possible without the hard work of Preston Smith, Steve Wagner, Federico Sacerdoti, Matt Rice Brent Chun and Davide Tachella. If you just take a glance at the ganglia ChangeLog or the ganglia-developers list archive, you’ll get a feel for how much they have contributed both in code and ideas.

Coming Very Soon

* Mason Katz is working with Carl Kesselman to have Ganglia export its data to Globus MDS.
* Matt Rice is finishing up a Windows port of ganglia using Cygwin

The Future

We have begun early planning for the third generation of ganglia. Ganglia 3 will have a developer’s kit for creating modules which plug directly into the monitoring core using DSO, a hierarchical XML namespace, a simplified multicast packet format, better visulization tools and much more.

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