I was curious if there has ever been any thought given to the idea of allowing gmond to dynamically load metric functions rather than having them compiled in? I have added some of my own, and I know that it is non-trivial to add new ones. The testing cycle is longer too because of the need to recompile gmond everytime an update to the code is made.
Would it be possible to have gmond use functions like dlopen (and friends) to load in the needed functions when it starts up? Then it would become much easier to add new metrics and debug them, or even to replace the current metrics with locally customized versions. Another nice thing would be that it could be used to create a thin wrapper around external programs like perl scripts that gather metrics. Rather than using gmetric to send the values, it could then pass through gmond. This would allow gmond to handle scheduling of when the script runs, apply its "threshold logic" to the returned value, etc. If I ever get some free time, I wouldn't mind working on something like that. But before I do, I wanted to find out if there was anything inherent in ganglia that would prevent this from being feasible. -- Rick -------------------------- Rick Mohr Systems Developer Ohio Supercomputer Center
