Cyberinfrastructure in New York State - Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Applications - page 38

FIGURE 2.2 The dashboard used to display the home page of the grid monitor. Note that
the user can click on any of the boxes to drill down for additional information.

2.2.2.2 Grid Monitoring and the Operations Dashboard

Our lightweight grid monitoring tool, which can be found at http://osg.
ccr.buffalo.edu, is used to monitor resources from a variety of grids, includ-
ing the NYS Grid, the WNY Grid, the Open Science Grid, the Open Science
Grid Testbed, and the TeraGrid to name a few (see Figure 2.2).* With pro-
duction grids still in their infancy, the ability to efi ciently and effectively
monitor a grid is important for users and administrators. Our grid moni-
toring system runs a variety of scripts on a continuous basis, stores infor-
mation in a MySQL database, and displays the information in an
easy-to-digest and easy-to-navigate grid dashboard. The dashboard is
served by an Apache server and is written in Java accompanied by PHP
scripts. The dashboard provides a display that consists of a radial plot in
the center of the main page that presents an overview of an available grid,
surrounded by histograms and other visual cues that present critical statis-
tics. By clicking on any of these individual components, the user can drill

* More details on information presented in this section may be found in Ruby et al. (2006).