Towards the integrated ALICE Online-Offline (O²) monitoring subsystem

¹ European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva, Switzerland
² IRI, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany
³ National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), Bari, Italy

^* Corresponding author: adam.wegrzynek@cern.ch

Published online: 17 September 2019

Abstract

ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) is preparing for a major upgrade of the detector, readout and computing systemsfor LHC Run 3. A new facility called O² (Online-Offline) will play a major role in data compression and event processing. To efficiently operate the experiment, we are designing a monitoring subsystem, which will provide a complete overview of the O² overall health, detect performance degradation and component failures. The monitoring subsystem will receive and collect up to 600 kHz of performance metrics. It consists of a custom monitoring library and a server-side, distributed software covering five main functional tasks: parameter collection and processing, storage, visualisation and alarms. To select the most appropriate tools for these tasks, we evaluated three options: “Modular Stack”, Zabbix and the currently used ALICE Grid monitoring tool called MonALISA. The former one consists of a toolkit including collectd, Apache Flume, Apache Spark, InfluxDB, Grafana and Riemann. This paper describes the monitoring subsystem functional architecture. It goes through a complete evaluation of the three considered options, the selection process, risk assessment and justification for the final decision. The in-depth comparison includes functional features and throughput measurement to ensure the required processing and storage performance.