Open Source Management Tools to Watch: Ganglia

Sharon Smith writes “There are a number of open source IT monitoring and management tools that enterprises should be keeping an eye on. In a recent InfoWorld blog, GroundWork Open Source CEO Ranga Rangachari highlights the Ganglia project. The Ganglia Monitoring System is an open source cluster monitoring technology started within UC Berkeley’s Millenium Clustered Computing Labs. It has been downloaded over 110,000 times from 145 countries and currently has dozens of contributing developers. As large companies are increasingly creating server farms of thousands of servers, new server management and monitoring requirements are surfacing. On the monitoring side, polling breaks down after a few hundred servers, so you have to go to an interrupt-driven architecture with “list and announce” protocols. Also, aside from the technical issues, traditional monitoring solutions are prohibitively expensive when you roll out hundreds of servers at a time. As clustering continues to become more pervasive in enterprise IT, Ganglia will be one to watch.”