BOINC

Plugin: python.d.plugin Module: boinc

Overview

This collector monitors task counts for the Berkeley Open Infrastructure Networking Computing (BOINC) distributed computing client.

It uses the same RPC interface that the BOINC monitoring GUI does.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector supports collecting metrics from multiple instances of this integration, including remote instances.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

By default, the module will try to auto-detect the password to the RPC interface by looking in /var/lib/boinc for this file (this is the location most Linux distributions use for a system-wide BOINC installation), so things may just work without needing configuration for a local system.

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

The default configuration for this integration is not expected to impose a significant performance impact on the system.

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

Per BOINC instance

These metrics refer to the entire monitored application.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

Metric	Dimensions	Unit
boinc.tasks	Total, Active	tasks
boinc.states	New, Downloading, Ready to Run, Compute Errors, Uploading, Uploaded, Aborted, Failed Uploads	tasks
boinc.sched	Uninitialized, Preempted, Scheduled	tasks
boinc.process	Uninitialized, Executing, Suspended, Aborted, Quit, Copy Pending	tasks

Alerts

The following alerts are available:

Alert name	On metric	Description
boinc_total_tasks	boinc.tasks	average number of total tasks over the last 10 minutes
boinc_active_tasks	boinc.tasks	average number of active tasks over the last 10 minutes
boinc_compute_errors	boinc.states	average number of compute errors over the last 10 minutes
boinc_upload_errors	boinc.states	average number of failed uploads over the last 10 minutes

Setup

Prerequisites

Boinc RPC interface

BOINC requires use of a password to access it's RPC interface. You can find this password in the gui_rpc_auth.cfg file in your BOINC directory.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is python.d/boinc.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config python.d/boinc.conf

Options

There are 2 sections:

• Global variables
• One or more JOBS that can define multiple different instances to monitor.

The following options can be defined globally: priority, penalty, autodetection_retry, update_every, but can also be defined per JOB to override the global values.

Additionally, the following collapsed table contains all the options that can be configured inside a JOB definition.

Every configuration JOB starts with a job_name value which will appear in the dashboard, unless a name parameter is specified.

Config options

Name	Description	Default	Required
update_every	Sets the default data collection frequency.	5	no
priority	Controls the order of charts at the netdata dashboard.	60000	no
autodetection_retry	Sets the job re-check interval in seconds.	0	no
penalty	Indicates whether to apply penalty to update_every in case of failures.	yes	no
name	Job name. This value will overwrite the job_name value. JOBS with the same name are mutually exclusive. Only one of them will be allowed running at any time. This allows autodetection to try several alternatives and pick the one that works.		no
hostname	Define a hostname where boinc is running.	localhost	no
port	The port of boinc RPC interface.		no
password	Provide a password to connect to a boinc RPC interface.		no

Examples

Configuration of a remote boinc instance

A basic JOB configuration for a remote boinc instance

remote:
 hostname: '1.2.3.4'
 port: 1234
 password: 'some-password'

Multi-instance

Note: When you define multiple jobs, their names must be unique.

Collecting metrics from local and remote instances.

Config

localhost:
  name: 'local'
  host: '127.0.0.1'
  port: 1234
  password: 'some-password'

remote_job:
  name: 'remote'
  host: '192.0.2.1'
  port: 1234
  password: some-other-password

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the boinc collector, run the python.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

• Navigate to the plugins.d directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the plugins setting under [directories].

  cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/

• Switch to the netdata user.

  sudo -u netdata -s

• Run the python.d.plugin to debug the collector:

  ./python.d.plugin boinc debug trace