High-performance Linux cluster monitoring using Java

Monitoring is at the heart of cluster management. Instrumentation data is used to schedule tasks, load-balance devices and services, notify administrators of hardware and software failures, and generally monitor the health and usage of a system. The information used to perform these operations must be gathered from the cluster without impacting performance. This paper discusses some of the performance barriers to efficient high-performance monitoring, and presents an optimized technique to gather monitored data using the /proc file system and Java.