Ganglia

Ganglia is a scalable distributed system monitor tool for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. It allows the user to remotely view live or historical statistics (such as CPU load averages or network utilization) for all machines that are being monitored.

Ganglia is available as the ganglia package on the AUR, along with the web frontend ganglia-web.

The Ganglia Wiki contains all the information you need to get started with Ganglia.

Troubleshooting

Issues with IP-address binding or undesirable hostnames

If bind_hostname = yes in the udp_send_channel section of gmond.conf, the gmond daemon will determine which IP to bind to (and report in the XML data) by determining the IP address of the default hostname. You should be able to replicate this behaviour with one of these commands:

$ hostname -i
$ host $(hostname)

The hostname to report is determined by asking the system to look up a hostname for the chosen IP address, in order to ensure the hostname is that by which other machines on the network identify the monitored machine:

$ host <ip-address>

The hostname listed at the top of the list is the one that will be reported by gmond, and will appear in the web UI. You can influence the returned hostname by modifying your /etc/hosts or /etc/nsswitch.conf files. In particular, watch out for placing myhostname before dns on the hosts line in /etc/nsswitch.conf. This will cause gmond to attempt to bind to a UDP port on 127.0.0.1, and it will fail to load.

If you're not able to achieve the desired behaviour, the hostname can be overridden in the gmond.conf file by adding the following lines to the globals section:

globals {
  ...
  override_hostname = myhostname.mydomain
  override_ip = 127.0.0.2
}

References

• E-mail exchange explaining IP and Hostname lookup: http://www.mail-archive.com/ganglia-general@lists.sourceforge.net/msg01885.html