I wanted to see if there was any interest in the Ganglia community in providing a way to incorporate sFlow counters in Ganglia. Looking at the source code it looks like it would be relatively straightforward to include modify gmond to allow an sflow_recv_channel (basically a udp_recv_channel listening on the well known sFlow port 6343). The listener acts as an sFlow to Ganglia proxy, decoding the XDR encoded sFlow datagrams, calculating counter delta's and converting the results to Ganglia metrics.
The sFlow protocol is used to export a wide range of counters from network devices, servers and virtual machines. http://www.sflow.org/developers/specifications.php There are two open source projects that include sFlow agents that may be of interest to the Ganglia community: http://openvswitch.org/ The Open vSwitch currently supports Xen, XenServer, KVM and VirtualBox. Enabling sFlow on the switch provide a stream of all the standard SNMP interface counters for every physical and virtual interface on the switch. http://host-sflow.sourceforge.net/ The Host sFlow agent exports the standard set of counters (based on libmetrics), along with additional counters providing performance data on all the virtual machines running on the system (based on libvirt). For a detailed description of the counters, see: http://www.sflow.org/sflow_host.txt Implementing sFlow support in Ganglia would provide a scalable, open source metric logging and trending solution for network data. Installing gmond on switches isn't feasible, but adding sFlow support to gmond would provide access to network metrics that are otherwise difficult to collect and should be of interest for cluster management as well (high packet discard rates in the switches has a significant impact on performance). Supporting the sFlow metrics exported from hosts avoids the need to install gmond on hosts that are already running an sFlow agent and provides access to additional metrics (virtual machine performance, power and temperature metrics are planned). What does everyone think? Is this a worthwhile effort? Would there be interest in incorporating this functionality in the next Ganglia release? I don't have a lot of experience with Ganglia development, are there any obvious architectural issues that would make this difficult? Thanks, Peter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Palm PDK Hot Apps Program offers developers who use the Plug-In Development Kit to bring their C/C++ apps to Palm for a share of $1 Million in cash or HP Products. Visit us here for more details: http://p.sf.net/sfu/dev2dev-palm _______________________________________________ Ganglia-developers mailing list Ganglia-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ganglia-developers
