MonALISA: An Agent Based, Dynamic Service System To Monitor, Control And . . .

The MonALISA (Monitoring Agents in A Large Integrated Services Architecture) system provides a distributed service architecture which is used to collect and process monitoring information. While its initial target field of application is networks and Grid systems supporting data processing and analysis for global high energy and nuclear physics collaborations, MonALISA is broadly applicable to many fields of "data intensive" science, and to the monitoring and management of major research and education networks. MonALISA is based on a scalable Dynamic Distributed Services Architecture), and is implemented in Java using JINI and WSDL technologies. The scalability of the system derives from the use of a multi threaded engine to host a variety of loosely coupled self-describing dynamic services, the ability of each service to register itself and then to be discovered and used by any other services, or clients that require such information. The framework integrates many existing monitoring tools and procedures to collect parameters describing computational nodes, applications and network performance. Specialized mobile agents are used in the MonALISA framework to perform global optimization tasks or help and improve the operation of large distributed system by performing supervising tasks for different applications or real time parameters. MonALISA is currently running around the clock monitoring several Grids and distributed applications on around 160 sites