SC4 Workshop

“Operational Requirements for Core Services”

James Casey, IT-GD, CERN

CERN, 21st June 2005

CERN IT-GD

Summary

• Issues as expressed by sites• ASGC, CNAF, FNAL, GRIDKA, PIC, RAL, TRIUMF

• My synopsis of the most important issues• Where we are on them…• What are possible solutions in longer term

CERN IT-GD

ASGC - Features missing in core services

• Local/remote diagnostic tests to verify the functionality and configuration. • This will be helpful for

• Verifying your configuration• Generating test results that can be used as the basis for

local monitoring• Detailed step-by-step troubleshooting guides • Example configurations for complex services

• e.g VOMS, FTS• Some error message can be improved to provide

more information to facilitate troubleshooting

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CNAF - Outstanding issues (1/2)

• Accounting (monthly reports):• CPU usage in KSI2K-days DGAS• Wall-clock time in KSI2K-days DGAS• Disk space used in TB• Disk space allocated in TB• Tape space used in TB• Validation of raw data gathered, by comparison via different tools

• Monitoring of data transfer: GridView and SAM?• More FTS monitoring tools necessary

• (traffic load per channel, per VO)

• Routing in LHC Optical Private Network? • Backup connection to FZK becoming urgent, and a lot of traffic

using the production network infrastructure, between non-associated T1-T1 and T1-T2 sites

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CNAF – Outstanding Issues (2/2)

• Implementation of a LHC OPN monitoring infrastructure still in its infancy

• SE Reliability when in unattended mode: greatly improved with latest Castor2 upgrade

• Castor2 performance during concurent import and export activities

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FNAL – Middleware additions

• It would be useful to have better hooks in the grid services to enable monitoring for 24/7 systems• We are implementing our own tests to connect to the

paging system• If the services had reasonable health monitors we could

connect to it might spare us re-implementing or missing an important element to monitor

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GRIDKA – Feature Requests

• improved (internal) monitoring• developers not always seem to be aware that hosts can have

more than 1 network interface. • It should be that hosts can be reached via their long living

alias and the actual name is unimportant (for reachability, not for security).

• Error messages should make sense and be human readable!• simple example :

• $ glite-gridftp-ls gsiftp://f01-015-105-r.gridka.de/pnfs/gridka.de/• (typo in the hostname ^^^)• t3076401696:p17226: Fatal error: [Thread System] GLOBUSTHREAD:

pthread_mutex_destroy() failed• [Thread System] mutex is locked (EBUSY)Aborted

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PIC – Some missing Features

• All in general:• Clearer error messages • Difficult to operate (eg, it should be possible to reboot a host without

affecting the service)

• SEs: • Missing a procedure for “draining” an SE or gently “take it out of

production”• Difficult to control access: for some features to be tested need the SE

published in the BDII, but once is there there is no way to control who can access

• Glite-CE:• A simple way to gather the DN of the submitter, having the Local Batch

jobID (GGUS-9323)

• FTS: • Unable to delete a channel which has “cancelled” transfers• Difficult to see a) that the service is having problems, and b) then to debug

them

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RAL – Missing Features in File Transfer Service

• Could collect more information (endpoints) dynamically• This is happening now in 1.5

• Logs• Comparing a successful and failed transfer is quite tricky

• I can show you two 25 line logs, one for a failed and one for a successful srmcopy. The logs are completely identical.

• Having logs files that are easy to parse for alerts or errors is of course very useful.

• Offsite monitoring• How do we know a service at CERN is dead?• And what is provided to interface it to local T1 monitoring.

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TRIUMF – Core Services (1/2)

• 'yaim', like any tool that wants to be general and complete, ends up being complicated to implement, to debug and to maintain. • In trying to do a lot from two scripts (install_node and

configure_node) and one environment file (node-info.def) bypasses some basic principles of unix system management:

• use small, independent tools, and combine them to achieve your goal.

• Often a 'configure_node' process needs to be run multiple times to get it right. • It would help a lot if it did not repeat useless, already

completed, time-consuming 'config_crl'.

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TRIUMF – Core Services (2/2)

• An enhancement for the yaim configure process: • it would also be useful if the configure_node process would

contain a hook to run a user-defined post-configuration step.

• There is frequently some local issue that needs to be addressed, and we would like to have a line in the script that calls a local, generic script that we could manage, and would not be over-written during 'yaim' updates.

• The really big hurdle will always be Tier 2's (large number of sites out there). • The whole process is just difficult for the Tier 2's. • It doesn't really matter all that much what the Tier 1's say -

they will and must cope. • One should be aggressively soliciting feedback from the

Tier 2's.

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Top 5….

• Better logging• Missing Information (e.g. DN in transfer log)• Hard to understand logs

• Better diagnostics tools• How do I verify my configuration is correct?• … and functional for all VOs?

• Toubleshooting guides• Better error messages from tools• Monitoring

• … and interfaces to allow central/remote components to be interfaced to local monitoring system

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Logging

• FTS Logs have several problems:• Only access to logs via interactive login on transfer node• Plans to have full info in DB

• Will come after schema upgrade in next FTS release• CLI tools/web interface to retrieve them

• Intermediate stage is to have final reason in DB• Outstanding bug sets this to AGENT_ERROR for 90% of

messages– Should be fixed soon (I hope!)

• Logs not understandable• When SRM v2.2 rewrite is done, a lot of cleanup will (need to)

happen

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Diagnostic tools/ Troubleshooting guides

• SAM (Site Availability Monitoring) is the solution for diagnostics• Can run validation tests as any VO, and see the results

• System is in infancy• Tests need expanding• But the system is very easy to write tests for • … and the web interface is quite nice to use

• Troubleshooting guides• These are acknowledged needed for all services

• T-2 tutorials helped in gathering some of these materials• Look at tutorials from last week in Indico for more info

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SAM 2

• Tests run as operations VO: ops• sensor test submission available for all VOs• critical test set for VOs (defined using FCR)

• Availability Monitoring• aggregation of results over a certain time • site services: CE, SE, sBDII, SRM• central services: FTS, LFC, RB• status calculated in every hour → availability

• current (last 24 hours), daily, weekly, monthly

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SAM Portal -- main

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SAM -- sensor page

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Monitoring

• It’s acknowledged the GRIDVIEW is not enough• It’s good for “static” displays, but not good for interactive

debugging

• We’re looking at other tools to parse the data• SLAC have interesting tools for monitoring netflow data

• This is very similar in format to the info we have in globus XFERLOGs

• And they even are thinking of alarm systems

• I’m interested to know what types of features such a debugging/monitoring system should have

• We’d keep it all integrated in a GRIDVIEW like-system

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Netflow et. al.

• Peaks at known capacities and RTTs• RTTs might suggest windows not optimized

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Mining data for sites

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Diurnal behavior

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One month for one site

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Effect of multiple streams

• Dilemma what do you recommend:• Maximize throughput but unfair, pushes other flows aside• Use another TCP stack, e.g. BIC-TCP, H-TCP etc.

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Thank you …