gmond.conf(5) - phpMan

gmond.conf(5) Ganglia Monitoring System gmond.conf(5)

NAME
gmond.conf - configuration file for ganglia monitoring daemon (gmond)

DESCRIPTION
The gmond.conf file is used to configure the ganglia monitoring daemon (gmond) which is
part of the Ganglia Distributed Monitoring System.

SECTIONS AND ATTRIBUTES
All sections and attributes are case-insensitive. For example, name or NAME or Name or
NaMe are all equivalent.

Some sections can be included in the configuration file multiple times and some sections
are singular. For example, you can have only one cluster section to define the attributes
of the cluster being monitored; however, you can have multiple udp_recv_channel sections
to allow gmond to receive message on multiple UDP channels.

cluster

There should only be one cluster section defined. This section controls how gmond reports
the attributes of the cluster that it is part of.

The cluster section has four attributes: name, owner, latlong and url.

For example,

cluster {
name = "Millennium Cluster"
owner = "UC Berkeley CS Dept."
latlong = "N37.37 W122.23"
url = "http://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/"
}

The name attributes specifies the name of the cluster of machines. The owner tag speci-
fies the administrators of the cluster. The pair name/owner should be unique to all clus-
ters in the world.

The latlong attribute is the latitude and longitude GPS coordinates of this cluster on
earth. Specified to 1 mile accuracy with two decimal places per axis in decimal.

The url for more information on the cluster. Intended to give purpose, owner, administra-
tion, and account details for this cluster.

There directives directly control the XML output of gmond. For example, the cluster con-
figuration example above would translate into the following XML.

host

The host section provides information about the host running this instance of gmond. Cur-
rently only the location string attribute is supported. Example:

host {
location = "1,2,3"
}

The numbers represent Rack, Rank and Plane respectively.

globals

The globals section controls general characteristics of gmond such as whether is should
daemonize, what user it should run as, whether is should send/receive date and such. The
globals section has the following attributes: daemonize, setuid, user, debug_level, mute,
deaf, allow_extra_data, host_dmax, cleanup_threshold, gexec, send_metadata_interval and
module_dir.

For example,

globals {
daemonize = true
setuid = true
user = nobody
host_dmax = 3600
}

The daemonize attribute is a boolean. When true, gmond will daemonize. When false, gmond
will run in the foreground.

The setuid attribute is a boolean. When true, gmond will set its effective UID to the uid
of the user specified by the user attribute. When false, gmond will not change its effec-
tive user.

The debug_level is an integer value. When set to zero (0), gmond will run normally. A
debug_level greater than zero will result in gmond running in the foreground and out-
putting debugging information. The higher the debug_level the more verbose the output.

The mute attribute is a boolean. When true, gmond will not send data regardless of any
other configuration directives.

The deaf attribute is a boolean. When true, gmond will not receive data regardless of any
other configuration directives.

The allow_extra_data attribute is a boolean. When false, gmond will not send out the
EXTRA_ELEMENT and EXTRA_DATA parts of the XML. This might be useful if you are using your
own frontend to the metric data and will like to save some bandwith.

The host_dmax value is an integer with units in seconds. When set to zero (0), gmond will
never delete a host from its list even when a remote host has stopped reporting. If
host_dmax is set to a positive number then gmond will flush a host after it has not heard
from it for host_dmax seconds. By the way, dmax means "delete max".

The cleanup_threshold is the minimum amount of time before gmond will cleanup any hosts or
metrics where tn > dmax a.k.a. expired data.

The gexec boolean allows you to specify whether gmond will announce the hosts availability
to run gexec jobs. Note: this requires that gexecd is running on the host and the proper
keys have been installed.

The send_metadata_interval establishes an interval in which gmond will send or resend the
metadata packets that describe each enabled metric. This directive by default is set to 0
which means that gmond will only send the metadata packets at startup and upon request
from other gmond nodes running remotely. If a new machine running gmond is added to a
cluster, it needs to announce itself and inform all other nodes of the metrics that it
currently supports. In multicast mode, this isn't a problem because any node can request
the metadata of all other nodes in the cluster. However in unicast mode, a resend inter-
val must be established. The interval value is the minimum number of seconds between
resends.

The module_dir is an optional parameter indicating the directory where the DSO modules are
to be located. If absent, the value to use is set at configure time with the --with-mod-
uledir option which will default if omitted to the a subdirectory named "ganglia" in the
directory where libganglia will be installed.

For example, in a 32-bit Intel compatible Linux host that is usually:

/usr/lib/ganglia

udp_send_channel

You can define as many udp_send_channel sections as you like within the limitations of
memory and file descriptors. If gmond is configured as mute this section will be ignored.

The udp_send_channel has a total of five attributes: mcast_join, mcast_if, host, port and
ttl.

For example, the 2.5.x version gmond would send on the following single channel by
default...

udp_send_channel {
mcast_join = 239.2.11.71
port = 8649
}

The mcast_join and mcast_if attributes are optional. When specified gmond will create the
UDP socket and join the mcast_join multicast group and send data out the interface speci-
fied by mcast_if.

If only a host and port are specified then gmond will send unicast UDP messages to the
hosts specified. You could specify multiple unicast hosts for redundancy as gmond will
send UDP messages to all UDP channels.

For example...

udp_send_channel {
host = host.foo.com
port = 2389
}
udp_send_channel {
host = 192.168.3.4
port = 2344
}

would configure gmond to send messages to two hosts. The host specification can be an
IPv4/IPv6 address or a resolvable hostname.

udp_recv_channel

You can specify as many udp_recv_channel sections as you like within the limits of memory
and file descriptors. If gmond is configured deaf this attribute will be ignored.

The udp_recv_channel section has following attributes: mcast_join, bind, port, mcast_if,
family. The udp_recv_channel can also have an acl definition (see ACCESS CONTROL LISTS
below).

For example, the 2.5.x gmond ran with a single udp receive channel...

udp_recv_channel {
mcast_join = 239.2.11.71
bind = 239.2.11.71
port = 8649
}

The mcast_join and mcast_if should only be used if you want to have this UDP channel
receive multicast packets the multicast group mcast_join on interface mcast_if. If you do
not specify multicast attributes then gmond will simply create a UDP server on the speci-
fied port.

You can use the bind attribute to bind to a particular local address.

The family address is set to inet4 by default. If you want to bind the port to an inet6
port, you need to specify that in the family attribute. Ganglia will not allow IPV6=>IPV4
mapping (for portability and security reasons). If you want to listen on both inet4 and
inet6 for a particular port, explicitly state it with the following:

udp_recv_channel {
port = 8666
family = inet4
}
udp_recv_channel {
port = 8666
family = inet6
}

If you specify a bind address, the family of that address takes precedence. f your IPv6
stack doesn't support IPV6_V6ONLY, a warning will be issued but gmond will continue work-
ing (this should rarely happen).

Multicast Note: for multicast, specifying a bind address with the same value used for
mcast_join will prevent unicast UDP messages to the same port from being processed.

tcp_accept_channel

You can specify as many tcp_accept_channel sections as you like within the limitations of
memory and file descriptors. If gmond is configured to be mute, then these sections are
ignored.

The tcp_accept_channel has the following attributes: bind, port, interface, family and
timeout. A tcp_accept_channel may also have an acl section specified (see ACCESS CONTROL
LISTS below).

For example, 2.5.x gmond would accept connections on a single TCP channel.

tcp_accept_channel {
port = 8649
}

The bind address is optional and allows you to specify which local address gmond will bind
to for this channel.

The port is an integer than specifies which port to answer requests for data.

tcp_accept_channel {
port = 8666
family = inet4
}
tcp_accept_channel {
port = 8666
family = inet6
}

If you specify a bind address, the family of that address takes precedence. If your IPv6
stack doesn't support IPV6_V6ONLY, a warning will be issued but gmond will continue work-
ing (this should rarely happen).

The timeout attribute allows you to specify how many microseconds to block before closing
a connection to a client. The default is set to 1 second (1000000 usecs). If you have a
very slow connection you may need to increase this value.

The interface is not implemented at this time (use bind).

collection_group

You can specify as many collection_group section as you like within the limitations of
memory. A collection_group has the following attributes: collect_once, collect_every and
time_threshold. A collection_group must also contain one or more metric sections.

The metric section has the following attributes: name, value_threshold and title. For a
list of available metric names, run the following command:

% gmond -m

Here is an example of a collection group for a static metric...

collection_group {
collect_once = yes
time_threshold = 1800
metric {
name = "cpu_num"
title = "Number of CPUs"
}
}

This collection_group entry would cause gmond to collect the cpu_num metric once at
startup (since the number of CPUs will not change between reboots). The metric cpu_num
would be send every 1/2 hour (1800 seconds). The default value for the time_threshold is
3600 seconds if no time_threshold is specified.

The time_threshold is the maximum amount of time that can pass before gmond sends all met-
rics specified in the collection_group to all configured udp_send_channels. A metric may
be sent before this time_threshold is met if during collection the value surpasses the
value_threshold (explained below).

Here is an example of a collection group for a volatile metric...

collection_group {
collect_every = 60
time_threshold = 300
metric {
name = "cpu_user"
value_threshold = 5.0
title = "CPU User"
}
metric {
name = "cpu_idle"
value_threshold = 10.0
title = "CPU Idle"
}
}

This collection group would collect the cpu_user and cpu_idle metrics every 60 seconds
(specified in collect_every). If cpu_user varies by 5.0% or cpu_idle varies by 10.0%,
then the entire collection_group is sent. If no value_threshold is triggered within
time_threshold seconds (in this case 300), the entire collection_group is sent.

Each time the metric value is collected the new value is compared with the old value col-
lected. If the difference between the last value and the current value is greater than
the value_threshold, the entire collection group is send to the udp_send_channels defined.

It's important to note that all metrics in a collection group are sent even when only a
single value_threshold is surpassed.

In addition a user friendly title can be substituted for the metric name by including a
title within the metric section.

Modules

A modules section contains the parameters that are necessary to load a metric module. A
metric module is a dynamically loadable module that extends the available metrics that
gmond is able to collect. Each modules section contains at least one module section.
Within a module section are the directives name, language, enabled, path and params. The
module name is the name of the module as determined by the module structure if the module
was developed in C/C++. Alternatively, the name can be the name of the source file if the
module has been implemented in a interpreted language such as python. A language designa-
tion must be specified as a string value for each module. The language directive must
correspond to the source code language in which the module was implemented (ex. language =
"python"). If a language directive does not exist for the module, the assumed language
will be "C/C++". The enabled directive allows a metric module to be easily enabled or dis-
abled through the configuration file. If the enabled directive is not included in the mod-
ule configuration, the enabled state will default to "yes". One thing to note is that if a
module has been disabled yet the metric which that module implements is still listed as
part of a collection group, gmond will produce a warning message. However gmond will con-
tinue to function normally by simply ignoring the metric. The path is the path from which
gmond is expected to load the module (C/C++ compiled dynamically loadable module only).
The params directive can be used to pass a single string parameter directly to the module
initialization function (C/C++ module only). Multiple parameters can be passed to the mod-
ule's initialization function by including one or more param sections. Each param section
must be named and contain a value directive. Once a module has been loaded, the additional
metrics can be discovered by invoking gmond -m.

modules {
module {
name = "example_module"
enabled = yes
path = "modexample.so"
params = "An extra raw parameter"
param RandomMax {
value = 75
}
param ConstantValue {
value = 25
}
}
}

Include

This directive allows the user to include additional configuration files rather than hav-
ing to add all gmond configuration directives to the gmond.conf file. The following exam-
ple includes any file with the extension of .conf contained in the directory conf.d as if
the contents of the included configuration files were part of the original gmond.conf
file. This allows the user to modularize their configuration file. One usage example
might be to load individual metric modules by including module specific .conf files.

include ('/etc/ganglia/conf.d/*.conf')

ACCESS CONTROL
The udp_recv_channel and tcp_accept_channel directives can contain an Access Control List
(ACL). This ACL allows you to specify exactly which hosts gmond process data from.

An example of an acl entry looks like

acl {
default = "deny"
access {
ip = 192.168.0.4
mask = 32
action = "allow"
}
}

This ACL will by default reject all traffic that is not specifically from host 192.168.0.4
(the mask size for an IPv4 address is 32, the mask size for an IPv6 address is 128 to rep-
resent a single host).

Here is another example

acl {
default = "allow"
access {
ip = 192.168.0.0
mask = 24
action = "deny"
}
access {
ip = ::ff:1.2.3.0
mask = 120
action = "deny"
}
}

This ACL will by default allow all traffic unless it comes from the two subnets specified
with action = "deny".

EXAMPLE
The default behavior for a 2.5.x gmond would be specified as...

udp_recv_channel {
mcast_join = 239.2.11.71
bind = 239.2.11.71
port = 8649
}
udp_send_channel {
mcast_join = 239.2.11.71
port = 8649
}
tcp_accept_channel {
port = 8649
}

To see the complete default configuration for gmond simply run:

% gmond -t

gmond will print out its default behavior in a configuration file and then exit. Captur-
ing this output to a file can serve as a useful starting point for creating your own cus-
tom configuration.

% gmond -t > custom.conf

edit custom.conf to taste and then

% gmond -c ./custom.conf

NOTES
The ganglia web site is at http://ganglia.info/.

ganglia/3.1.2 2009-01-28 gmond.conf(5)

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