GlueDomains: Organization and Accessibility of Network Monitoring Data in a Grid

The availability of the outcome of network monitoring activities, while valuable for the operation of Grid applications, poses serious scalability problems: in principle, in a Grid composed of resources, we need to keep record of end-to-end paths. We introduce a scalable approach to network monitoring, that consists in partitioning the Grid into limiting monitoring activity to the measurement of domain-to-domain connectivity. Partitions must be consistent with network performance, since we expect that an observed network performance between domains is representative of the performance between the Grid Services included into such domains. We argue that partition design is a critical step: a consequence of an inconsistent partitioning is the production of invalid characteristics. The paper discusses such approach, also exploring its limits. We describe a fully functional prototype which is currently under test in the frame of the DATATAG project