Ganglia Installation

Ok, I will save you a lot of trouble by telling you right now that, at the time of writing this blog you should compile your own RPM from the tarball available on sourceforge with the following statment:

rpmbuild -ta --target=x86_64,no_arch ./ganglia-3.1.7.tar.gz

You will need some extra binaries from EPEL on your machine in order to compile the RPM, including expat-devel, apr-devel, libconfuse-devel, rpm-build, and some others depending on your base CentOS 5 install.

Take these RPMs, and distribute them to all of the nodes in your cluster, or puppet it up for those that are savvy enough now to do so. Careful of the rpm provider, as there is a bug in it for now with already installed RPMs.

For a node:

rpm -i libganglia-3.1.7-YOUARCH.rpm ganglia-gmond-3.1.7-YOURARCH.rpm ganglia-gmond-modules-python-3.1.7-YOURARCH.rpm

For the front-end:

rpm -i libganglia-3.1.7-YOURARCH.rpm ganglia-gmetad-3.1.7-YOURARCH.rpm ganglia-web-3.1.7-noarch.rpm

Configure your /etc/ganglia/gmetad.conf with a *single* new data_source line for all of your nodes in the cluster, start your services and you are off to the races.

Trust me when I say that installing from the current yum repositories (base and EPEL) is a complete and total waste of your time.