Admon

The BeeGFS Administration and Monitoring System (short: Admon) provides a graphical interface to perform administrative management tasks and to monitor the state of the file system and its components.

The BeeGFS Administration and Monitoring System consists of two parts:

• The Admon daemon, which can run on any machine with network access to the metadata and storage servers. This daemon gathers the status information of the other BeeGFS services and stores it in a database.
• The graphical Java-based client, which can run on your workstation. It connects to the remote Admon daemon via http.

Note

It is recommend to use Oracle Java Runtime Environment 7 (formerly known as Sun JRE 7) or higher to run the BeeGFS Admon GUI. Other Java runtime environments may work, but are not fully tested.

Installation and basic Setup

The Administration and Monitoring System for BeeGFS is contained in the optional beegfs-admon package.

The package is available either from the general BeeGFS repository or via direct download.

The package provides an init script to start the Admon daemon (/etc/init.d/beegfs-admon) and a configuration file (/etc/beegfs/beegfs-admon.conf).

Note

If you installed BeeGFS manually (i.e. not via the Admon GUI), you need to edit the beegfs-admon.conf file and set the parameter sysMgmtdHost to the hostname of your management server.

After installation, start the daemon:

$ /etc/init.d/beegfs-admon start

The graphical user interface for BeeGFS Admon comes packaged together with the Admon daemon and is located in /opt/beegfs/beegfs-admon-gui.

Admon GUI Start

If your BeegFS Admon daemon is not running yet, start it as described here: Admon Installation and basic setup

By default, TCP port 8000 will be opened by the daemon for HTTP connections.

To get the GUI, point your browser to http://Host_Where_The_Admon_Runs:8000 and download the jar-file from there.

The GUI can be started by double clicking from a file browser or by using the java -jar command (depending on your operating system and configuration). If you want to run the GUI from its default location on the Admon host, use the following command:

$ java -jar /opt/beegfs/beegfs-admon-gui/beegfs-admon-gui.jar

At first start, you will be prompted to provide the hostname and port (default: 8000) of the host on which the Admon daemon is running. It is also possible to change the resolution of the internal desktop of the GUI and the default log level of the GUI.

Note

It is recommend to use Oracle Java Runtime Environment 7 (formerly known as Sun JRE 7) or higher to run the BeeGFS Admon GUI. Other Java runtime environments may work, but are not fully tested.

Admon Login

The login mechanism is based on two predefined users.

The user “Information” (which has the initial password “information”) is only able to view statistics, whereas the user “Administrator” (which has the initial password “admin”) is also able to perform administrative tasks.

It is highly recommended that the first thing you do is to log in using the administrative account and change the predefined passwords.

A user with administrative privileges can also turn off the need for authentication for the informational user.

Admon Main Menu

The menu is a tree-like view on the left hand side and the associated windows will open on double-click. The following sections will give a short overview of the different items.

The menu is a tree-like view on the left hand side and the associated windows will open on double-click. The following sections will give a short overview of the different items.

Metadata Nodes

The menu item “Metadata Nodes” contains an overview page, as well as a dedicated page for each metadata node in the system.

The overview shows basic information, the status of all nodes and the total number of metadata requests in the system.

The page for a specific metadata node shows some general information on the node itself, the status of the node and the number of work requests to this node.

Storage Nodes

Like the meta nodes menu, the menu item “Storage Nodes” also consists of an overview page, as well as a dedicated page for each storage node in the system.

Values which can be retrieved on these pages include the general status information, as well as disk space usage and data throughput.

For disk performance, four values are displayed. While the read and write graphs are very exact (measured every second), they are also very erratic. The averaged graphs are better suited to identify a tendency. These graphs are always an average of the last 30 values. You can easily hide each throughput line by disabling the appropriate checkbox under the graphic.

Note that only the 10 min history view is based on the exact one second interval. The other history views are based on more coarse-grained (averaged) values.

Client statistics

The pages contains the client statistics for metadata operations (create, stat, …) or the clients statistics for the storage operations (read, write, …).

User statistics

The pages contains the user statistics for metadata operations (create, stat, …) or the user statistics for the storage operations (read, write, …).

Management

The management pages contain elements for administrative tasks. The page “Known Problems” is designed as a quick overview of the system’s health. All problems related to the status of the nodes and their interconnection are listed here. The “Start/Stop Daemon” page allows start or stop all daemons and clients. The item “Log Files” opens a window which shows the log files of all daemons and clients.

FS Operations

The menu item “FS Operations”->”Stripe Settings” allows you to view and change the striping information in your file system. In BeeGFS, it is possible to define the chunk-size of data that will be written, as well as the number of storage targets, over which one file will typically be distributed. The corresponding information can be retrieved on this page. Furthermore, if you logged in with administrative privileges, the system will allow you to change these settings for each directory in the file system.

With the file browser you can browse through the global BeeGFS and retrieve information on the stored files. Please note, that although you are able to see directories and files, you will not be able to view the content.

Installation

The management pages contain elements for automation and simplification of the installation/uninstallation tasks. Please refer to the BeeGFS installation guide for a detailed description. Also the installation log file is available in this menu.

Admon Menu Bar

The menu bar contains options which are not required for the installation and the day by day administration.

Admon

The menu item “Change Settings” contains the configuration options of the GUI. Also the logout option and the close option for the GUI.

Administration

The options inside the menu item “User Settings” allow you to change the login passwords and to disable the password for the Information user. The effect of the latter is that users can view the web-frontend without being asked for a password. (The administrative account is not affected by this setting).

The menu item “Mail Settings” lets you define some values for e-Mail notifications by the software. If configured accordingly, an administrator can receive an e-Mail whenever a node in the system appears to be down. These pages are only accessible by the user “Administrator”.