Experiences in designing a modular resource monitoring system

Resource monitoring plays a vital role in the grid. One of its basic features is the capability to deal with with the heterogeneous resources available in the grid, and, consequently, the possibility to support both new and existing monitoring tools in a modular way. We start from this observation to discuss what are the components of a grid resource monitoring system and the requirements they need to satisfy. We then show, as a case study, how the NWS monitoring tool can be integrated with a LDAP-based directory service. We use the results of this case study to outline a modular architecture for a generic resource monitoring system. A proof of concept implementation is finally presented.