ApMon - Application Monitoring API for Java
				version 2.2.7
		  ********************************************
		    ***************************************
				May 2006
			California Institute of Technology
		    ****************************************			

1. Introduction
2. What's new in version 2.x?
3. Installation 
4. Using ApMon
5. xApMon - Monitoring information
6. Logging
7. Bug reports

1. Introduction
****************
  ApMon is an API that can be used by any application to send monitoring
information to MonALISA services (http://monalisa.caltech.edu). The
monitoring data is sent as UDP datagrams to one or more hosts running MonALISA.
The MonALISA host may require a password enclosed in each datagram, for 
authentication purposes. ApMon can also send datagrams that contain monitoring
information regarding the system or the application.  
 

2. What's new in version 2.x?
*******************************
  ApMon 2.0 was extended with xApMon, a feature that allows it to send to the 
MonALISA service datagrams with monitoring information regarding the system or
the application. This extension can be used completely on Linux systems and
partially on Windows systems.  
  In this ApMon version there is also the possibility to associate the 
datagrams with timestamps set by the user.


3. Installation
****************
  The ApMon archive contains the following files and folders:
  - apmon/ - package that contains the ApMon class and other helper classes
(including XDRDataOutput and XDROutputStream - part of a library for XDR
encoding/decoding, provided under the LGPL license - see 
http://java.freehep.org); apmon includes the lisa_host package, which contains
classes from LISA (http://monalisa.caltech.edu/dev_lisa.html).
  - lib/ - directory which will contain, after building, the libraries 
needed in order to use ApMon
  - examples/ - examples for using the routines
  - lesser.txt - the LGPL license for the XDR library 
  - destinations.conf - contains the IP addresses or DNS names of the 
destination hosts and the ports where the MonaLisa modules listen
  - build_apmon.sh, env_apmon - for building on Linux systems
  - build_apmon.bat - for building on Windows systems
  - README
  - Doxyfile - for generating Doxygen documentation

  There is an additional directory, ApMon_docs, which contains the Doxygen
documentation of the source files.
 
  To build ApMon on Linux systems:
  1) set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the location where Java is 
installed
  2) To build ApMon, cd to the ApMon directory and type:
	./build_apmon.sh
  The ApMon jar file (apmon.jar) and a small Linux library (libnativeapm.so)
are now available in the lib/ directory.
  In order to use ApMon, the CLASSPATH must contain the path to apmon.jar
and, optionally, the LD_LIBRARY_PATH must contain the path to libnativeapm.so
(this library only provides one function, mygetpid(), which has the
functionality of getpid(). You might want to use it for job monitoring,   
as in Example_x1.java and Example_x2.java). You can adjust the CLASSPATH 
and LD_LIBRARY_PATH manually or by sourcing the env_apmon script.

  To build the ApMon examples, go to the examples/ directory and type:
	./build_examples.sh

  To build ApMon on Windows systems:
  1) add the directory that contains the apmon package to the CLASSPATH
  2) run build_apmon.bat
  2) when running the examples, the directory apmon\lisa_host\Windows must be 
in the library path (the system.dll library from this directory will be used).
This can be done by using the option -Djava.library.path:
  java -Djava.library.path=<path to apmon\lisa_host\Windows> exampleSend_1a
	

4. Using ApMon
*******************
  We defined a class called ApMon, which holds the
parameters that the user wants to include in the datagram, until the datagram
is sent. 
  The datagram sent to the MonaLisa module has the following structure:
  - a header which has the following syntax: 
      v:<ApMon_version>p:<password>       
      
      (the password is sent in plaintext; if the MonALISA host does not require
      a password, an 0-length string should be sent instead of the password).
      
  - cluster name (string) - the name of the monitored cluster 
  - node name (string) - the name of the monitored nodes
  - number of parameters (int)
  - for each parameter: name (string), value type (int), value (can be double,
int or string)
  - optionally a timestamp (int) if the user wants to specify the time
associated with the data; if the timestamp is not given, the current time on
the destination host which runs MonALISA will be used.

  The ApMon class has a constructor with the name of a configuration file as
the unique parameter. The configuration file specifies the IP addresses or
DNS names of the hosts running MonALISA, to which the data is sent, and
also specifies the ports on which the MonALISA service listens, on the 
destination hosts. The configuration file contains a line of the following 
form for each destination host:

IP_address|DNS_name[:port] [password]

Examples:
rb.rogrid.pub.ro:8884 mypassword
rb.rogrid.pub.ro:8884
ui.rogrid.pub.ro mypassword
ui.rogrid.pub.ro

If the port is not specified, the default value 8884 will be assumed.
If the password is not specified, an empty string will be sent as password
to the MonALISA host (and the host will only accept the datagram if it does not
require a password). 
The configuration file may contain blank lines and comment lines (starting 
with "#"); these lines are ignored, and so are the leading and the trailing
white spaces from the other lines. 

An ApMon object can also be intialized from a list which contains hostnames and
ports as explained above, and/or URLs from where the names of the
destination hosts and the corresponding ports are to be read; the URLs
are associated with plain text configuration files which have the format 
described above. The URLs can also represent requests to a servlet or a CGI
script which can automatically provide the best configuration, taking into 
account the geographical zone in which the machine which runs ApMon is 
situated, and the application for which ApMon is used 
(see Example_confgen.java). The geographical zone is determined from the
machine's IP and the applicaiton name is given by the user as the value of the
"appName" parameter included in the URL.

 There are two ways in which the user can send parameter values to MonALISA:
  a) a single parameter in a datagram
  b) multiple parameters in a datagram

  For sending a datagram with a single parameter, the user should call the
function sendParameter() which has several overloaded variants.

  For sending multiple parameters in a datagram, the user should call the
function sendParameters(), which receives as arguments arrays with the names
and the values of the parameters to be sent.

  When the ApMon object is no longer in use, the stopIt() method should be
called in order to close the UDP socket used for sending the parameters.

  Since version 2.0 there are two additional functions, sendTimedParameter() 
and sendTimedParameters(), which allow the user to specify a timestamp
for the parameters.

  The configuration file and/or URLs can be periodically checked for changes,
but this option is disabled by default. In order to enable it, the user should
call setConfCheck(true); the value of the time interval at which the recheck
operatins are performed, can be set with the function setRecheckInterval().
The way in which the configuration file or URLs are checked for
changes can be also specified in the configuration file:

  - to enable/disable the periodical checking of the configuration file
or URLs:
xApMon_conf_recheck = on/off

  - to set the time interval at which the file/URLs are checked for changes:
xApMon_recheck_interval = <number_of_seconds>
 
  For a better understanding of how to use the functions mentioned above, see
the Doxygen documentation and the examples.

  LIMITATIONS:
  The maximum size of a datagram is specified by the constant MAX_DGRAM_SIZE;
by default it is 8192B and the user should not modify this value as some hosts
may not support UDP datagrams larger than 8KB. 


5. xApMon - Monitoring information
***********************************
ApMon can be configured to send to the MonALISA service monitoring information 
regarding the application or the system. The system monitoring information
is obtained from the proc/ filesystem and the job monitoring information is
obtained by parsing the output of the ps command. If job monitoring for a
process is requested, all its sub-processes will be taken into consideration
(i.e., the resources consumed by the process and all the subprocesses will be
summed).

There are three categories of monitoring datagrams that ApMon can send:

a) job monitoring information - contains the following parameters:

   job_run_time		- elapsed time from the start of this job
   job_cpu_time   	- processor time spent running this job
   job_cpu_usage	- percent of the processor used for this job, as 
			  reported by ps
   job_virtualmem 	- virtual memory occupied by the job (in KB)
   job_rss              - resident image size of the job (in KB)
   job_mem_usage	- percent of the memory occupied by the job, as 
			  reported by ps
   job_workdir_size     - size in MB of the working directory of the job
   job_disk_total       - size in MB of the disk partition containing the 
			  working directory
   job_disk_used        - size in MB of the used disk space on the partition 
			  containing the working directory
   job_disk_free        - size in MB of the free disk space on the partition 
			  containing the working directory
   job_disk_usage       - percent of the used disk partition containing the 
			  working directory


b) system monitoring information - contains the following parameters:

   sys_cpu_usr  	- percent of the time spent by the CPU in user mode 
   sys_cpu_sys          - percent of the time spent by the CPU in system mode
   sys_cpu_nice		- percent of the time spent by the CPU in nice mode
   sys_cpu_idle		- percent of the time spent by the CPU in idle mode
   sys_cpu_usage 	- CPU usage percent
   sys_load1            - average system load over the last minute
   sys_load5		- average system load over the last 5 min
   sys_load15		- average system load over the last 15 min
   sys_mem_used         - amount of currently used memory, in MB
   sys_mem_free		- amount of free memory, in MB
   sys_mem_usage	- used system memory in percent
   sys_swap_used        - amount of currently used swap, in MB 
   sys_swap_free	- amount of free swap, in MB
   sys_swap_usage	- swap usage in percent
   sys_net_in           - network (input)  transfer in kBps
   sys_net_out          - network (input)  transfer in kBp   
  (these will produce params called sys_ethX_in, sys_ethX_out, sys_ethX_errs, 
   corresponding to each network interface)
   sys_processes	- curent number of processes
   sys_uptime		- system uptime in days
        
 In the other ApMon versions there also is a parameter called "sys_net_errs"
 (the number of network errors). This parameter is not available in
 the Java version, but can be present in the configuration file, for 
compatibility with the other versions.

c) general system information - contains the following parameters:
   hostname		
   ip                  	- will produce ethX_ip params for each interface
   cpu_MHz		- CPU frequency
   no_CPUs             	- number of CPUs
   total_mem		- total amount of memory, in MB
   total_swap		- total amount of swap, in MB
   cpu_vendor_id	- the CPU's vendor ID
   cpu_family
   cpu_model
   cpu_model_name
   bogomips             - number of bogomips for the CPU  
   


These parameters are only available on Linux systems. 
 
The parameters from a) and b)  can be enabled/disabled from the 
configuration file (if they are disabled, they will not be included in the
datagrams). In order to enable/disable a parameter, the user should write in
the configuration file lines of the following form:

xApMon_parametername = on/off

(example: xApMon_sys_load1 = off)

The job/system monitoring can be enabled/disabled by including the following 
lines in the configuration file:

xApMon_job_monitoring = on/off
xApMon_sys_monitoring = on/off

The datagrams with general system information are only sent if system 
monitoring is enabled, at greater time intervals (2 datagrams with general
system information for each 100 system monitoring datagrams). To enable/
disable the sending of general system information datagrams, the following
line should be written in the configuration file:

xApMon_general_info = on/off

The time interval at which job/system monitoring datagrams are sent can be set
with:

xApMon_job_interval = <number_of_seconds>
xApMon_sys_interval = <number_of_seconds>

To enable/disable the job/system monitoring, and also to set the time 
intervals, the functions setJobMonitoring() and setSysMonitoring() can be
used (see the API docs for more details).

To monitor jobs, you have to specify the PID of the parent process for the 
tree of processes that you want to monitor, the working directory, the cluster 
and the node names that will be registered in MonALISA (and also the job 
monitoring must be enabled). If work directory is "", no information will be 
retrieved about disk:
  addJobToMonitor(long pid, String workdir, String clusterName,
			    String nodeName);

  To stop monitoring a job, the removeJobToMonitor(long pid) should be called.

6. Logging
***********
  ApMon prints its messages to a file called apmon.log, with the aid of the 
Logger class from the Java API. The user may print its own messages
with the logger (see the examples).
The ApMon loglevels are FATAL (equivalent to Level.SEVERE), WARNING, INFO, 
FINE, DEBUG (equivalent to Level.FINEST). The ApMon loglevel can be
set from the configuration file (by default it is INFO):

xApMon_loglevel = <level>
e.g.,
xApMon_loglevel = FINE

  When setting the loglevel in the configuration file, you must use the ApMon 
level names rather than the Java names (so that the configuration file be
compatible with the other ApMon versions).

7. Bug reports
***************
  For bug reports, suggestions and comments please write to: 
  [email protected]