Nagios, MyEGEE and MyEGI

[With thanks to Cristina Del Cano Novales at STFC]

The story so far... early last month we started to deploy WLCG Nagios as a replacement for the existing INCA testing service.

STFC set up the servers and deployed the latest published version of WLCG Nagios before handing the baton to Leeds. Leeds are configuring Nagios and the ecosystem of software that supports it.

And it is a there is a lot of supporting software.

In addition to Nagios itself, the NCG configuration tool and the plugins that actually do the work - all of which were described in a previous post - the WLCG package includes..

• pnp4nagios to keep and display historical records of performance metrics.
• an ActiveMQ message bus to pass data to wherever it needs to be. STFC have cunningly configured this on the development box so that it can only talk to itself.
  
• a MySQL database to keep status information .

There are two web tools called MyEGEE and MyEGI that allow people to extract the bits of information in that database that are relevant to them.

Both are built on the kind of general purpose frameworks that have sprung up since people started bandying around the term 'Web 2.0' as if it meant something. Much of what is seen as Web 2.0 is - at its heart - as some way of reading, or updating, a database from a suitably interactive and pretty webpage. Frameworks to do database wrangling are available for all popular languages and a quite a few unpopular ones.

MyEGEE is written in PHP on top of Zend Framework; MyEGI is python and based around Django.

According to a presentation at the EGI Technical Forum - highlighted by one of our colleagues from STFC - MyEGI will replace MyEGEE in the next few months. The developers are expecting to produce the first official MyEGI release in November.