Site specific monitoring of multiple information systems – the HappyFace Project

Abstract

An efficient administration of computing centres requires sophisticated tools for the monitoring of the local infrastructure. Sharing such resources in a grid infrastructure, like the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), goes ahead with a large number of external monitoring systems, offering information on the status of the services and user jobs at a grid site. This huge flood of information from many different sources retards the identification of problems and complicates the local administration. In addition, the web interfaces for the access to the site specific information are often very slow and uncomfortable to use.A meta-monitoring system which automatically queries the different relevant monitoring systems could provide a fast and comfortable access to all important information for the local administration. It becomes also feasible to easily correlate information from different sources and provides an easy access also for non-expert users. In this paper, we describe the HappyFace Project, a modular software framework for such purpose. It queries existing monitoring sources and processes the results to provide a single point of entrance for information on a grid site and its specific services.