Ganglia Vs. Munin
In many ways, a computer network resembles the human brain in the way that it functions. Like neurons, individual units or nodes within a network communicate back and forth with other nodes. The overall performance and health of a computer network -- and your brain -- depends upon the health of each node and each connection between them. Ganglia and Munin are two computer network monitoring tools that assist system administrators in assessing and improving the health of their networks.
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Ganglia Overview
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Ganglia is a monitoring tool for complex conglomerations of computers linked together through network connections. Ganglia monitors the network traffic between clusters of computers linked to other clusters forming high-performance computer systems used for business, science and engineering calculations. Ganglia is free open source software licensed under the BSD License. Ganglia's code can be compiled and run on many different operating systems and central processing units.
Ganglia Advantages
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Ganglia consists of two parts: the Ganglia daemon that runs on each node in the network and the Web-based front end that aggregates and processes the data from each node. Ganglia Web gives the administrator insight into overall network health, including disk drive usage, number of running processes, which parts of the network are utilized more than others and which nodes are down or under-performing. With Ganglia Web you can arbitrarily group clusters together for reporting purposes. Ganglia writes the data it collects in the portable XML or External Data Representation formats that are easily read and processed by software available on most computer systems .
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Munin Overview
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Munin is an open source network-monitoring tool licensed under the GNU General Public License. Munin is engineered for smaller networks of computers and devices than Ganglia. Each node in the network runs a Munin application daemon that gathers information about its own state. The Munin master application runs on a single host and periodically gathers and records information from each node. Munin is written in the Perl scripting language. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX, OS X and HP-UX operating systems.
Munin Advantages
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Munin focuses on historical data or trends. According to its website, Munin helps you determine "what's different today" about your network. Munin's data collecting ability can be extended through the use of plug-ins. Munin displays its data through a customizable Web-based interface. There are plug-ins available that allow you to create graphical views of your data. Currently, Munin has full support for Internet Protocol version 6 or IPv6 networks.
Which Tool to Use
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If you manage a very large and diverse network of several clusters of computers separated geographically, Ganglia is the obvious choice. Some of Ganglia's code is compiled for each node, so its performance is not hampered as your network grows. Each Ganglia cluster can have up to 2000 nodes. Ganglia is used by Twitter, the San Diego Supercomputing Center, Industrial Light & Magic, Virginia Tech, Microsoft, NASA, National Institutes of Health, Harvard and CERN. On the other hand, Munin is better suited for administrators of smaller networks who need to be able to identify and fix problems by examining network history. Because Munin is written in Perl, its functionally can be extended by using the huge archive of tested Perl code and documentation in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network or CPAN library.
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