Essential Grid Workflow Monitoring Elements

Troubleshooting Grid workflows is difficult. A typical workflow involves a large number of components – networks, middleware, hosts, etc. – that can fail. Even when monitoring data from all these components is accessible, it is hard to tell whether failures and anomalies in these components are related to a given workflow. For the Grid to be truly usable, much of this uncertainty must be eliminated. We propose two new Grid monitoring elements, Grid workflow identifiers and consistent component lifecycle events, that will make Grid troubleshooting easier, and thus make Grids more usable, by simplifying the correlation of Grid monitoring data with a particular Grid workflow.