About IBM Spectrum LSF RTM

IBM® Spectrum LSF RTM (RTM) is an operational dashboard for IBM Spectrum LSF environments that provides comprehensive workload monitoring, reporting, and management. It makes cluster administrators more efficient in their day-to-day activities and provides the information and tools that are needed to improve cluster efficiency, enable better user productivity, and contain or reduce costs.

RTM caters to three user groups who are each responsible for monitoring and reporting in the LSF environment. LSF administrators, who are responsible for monitoring and maintaining the LSF clusters and application license servers, are the most common users of RTM.

Unlike other monitoring tools that focus on just one facet of cluster monitoring, RTM provides a complete, integrated monitoring facility that is designed specifically for LSF environments. Multiple clusters can be monitored easily and effectively through a single intuitive interface.

Figure 1 shows a high-level view of RTM in an LSF environment.

Figure 1. Overview of RTM

RTM is workload and resource-aware providing full visibility to LSF clusters. It provides comprehensive workload monitoring, reporting, and management tools. Using RTM you can monitor and graph LSF resources (including networks, disks, applications, and others) in a cluster. In graph or report formats, RTM displays resource-related information such as the number of jobs that are submitted, the details of individual jobs (like load average, CPU usage, job owner), or the hosts on which the jobs ran.

FLEXlm is a third-party license manager that is monitored by RTM for license control.

RTM and Cacti

Cacti is a complete RRDTool-based graphing solution that is developed by The Cacti Group. RTM uses Cacti as a rich graphical user interface framework to provide monitoring, reporting, and alerting functions specifically for the LSF environment. The LSF capabilities are included as a Cacti plug-in so that when used together, RTM can offer LSF-specific monitoring and reporting capabilities. These features are in addition to the standard capabilities that you would normally get from the open source Cacti package.

This documentation assumes that you are familiar with Cacti. For an introduction to Cacti itself, and for information specific to Cacti, refer to the Cacti documentation at cacti.net/documentation.php.

To ensure that all data are collected efficiently from the LSF environment, IBM provides specific data pollers that work with RTM. You are free to use your own data pollers to work with RTM, but IBM does not provide support for those custom data pollers.