Event Management and Monitoring Framework for HPC Environments using ServiceNow and Prometheus

Abstract

The challenge of monitoring and event response management of a high performance computing facility grows significantly as the facilities employs and orchestrates more complex and heterogeneous systems and infrastructure. As the computational components encompassing the HPC facility system increases, the computational staff experiences rise in alert fatigue due to the false alarms and noise related to the similar events generated by monitoring tools. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has begun to address the issues of duplication of alerts and alert remediation. However, more automation and integration is needed for collecting, aggregating, correlating, analyzing, managing and visualizing the scale of events that will be generated by the emergent hybrid computing infrastructures. In this paper, we present an event management and monitoring framework that addresses the operational needs of the future pre-exascale systems at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC). The framework integrates the Operations Monitoring and Notification Infrastructure (OMNI) at NERSC with the Prometheus, Grafana and ServiceNow platforms to help identify, diagnose, and resolve incidents in real-time, as well as conduct more thorough post-incident reviews enabled by the intuitive dashboards that provides a single pane of glass console for an efficient operations management and real-time proactive monitoring.