04 March 2008

Visualising FTS transfers


As always, monitoring is a hot topic. Sites, experiments and operations people all want to know what Grid services are doing and how this is impacting on their work. In particular, it is clear from todays GDB that monitoring of the FTS is important. The above graph shows the output of a script which I have put together over the past day which queries the RAL FTS service for information about its channels, their transfer rates and information about the number of jobs that are scheduled to be transferred. In fact, I don't query the FTS directly, but use some CGI that Matt Hodges at RAL set up (thanks Matt!). It's a prototype at the moment, but I think it could be one useful way of looking at the data and getting an overview of the state of transfers.

You can see the latest plots for the WLCG VOs here. They are updated hourly. I still need to play about with the colours to try and improve the visual effect. It would be great if the line thickness could be varied with transfer rate, but I don't think GraphViz/pydot can do that.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Drawing a pie chart may be a way to visualise the width of those lines.

Jens Jensen said...

Another FTS visualisation:
Gidon coded a version of the RTM for me for the Manchester EGEE user forum in May 07 which also visualises FTS transfers. It showed those that were recorded by R-GMA, so mostly for the larger sites.
It worked well, but wasn't quite real time since it used recorded input and we sped up the replay by x100.
Gidon gave me the source and everything before he left us.

Stephen Childs said...

It might also be worth looking at HyperGraph which gives a pseudo-3D representation. The format is very straightforward XML that's as easy to generate as dot. We've used it to represent monitoring information and include graphs for Quattor profiles. More at http://hypergraph.sourceforge.net/