HPC usage statistics - history

In HPC, we can get the real time usage statistics using qstat, pbsnodes, showq. But is there a way to get the usage history or is the usage history saved in some log files? I am interested in getting the usage history of particular user.

Torque keeps logs in the server_priv/accounting directory of the Torque install. Maui keeps logs in the stats directory of the Maui install. You should be able to grep the files corresponding to the dates you are interested in. In the past, I've opened up Maui stats in a spreadsheet as a space delimited file with some success.

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Where can I get node exporter metrics description?

I'm new to monitoring the k8s cluster with prometheus, node exporter and so on.
I want to know that what the metrics exactly mean for though the name of metrics are self descriptive.
I already checked the github of node exporter, but I got not useful information.
Where can I get the descriptions of node exporter metrics?
Thanks
There is a short description along with each of the metrics. You can see them if you open node exporter in browser or just curl http://my-node-exporter:9100/metrics. You will see all the exported metrics and lines with # HELP are the description ones:
# HELP node_cpu_seconds_total Seconds the cpus spent in each mode.
# TYPE node_cpu_seconds_total counter
node_cpu_seconds_total{cpu="0",mode="idle"} 2.59840376e+07
Grafana can show this help message in the editor:
Prometheus (with recent experimental editor) can show it too:
And this works for all metrics, not just node exporter's. If you need more technical details about those values, I recommend searching for the information in Google and man pages (if you're on Linux). Node exporter takes most of the metrics from /proc almost as-is and it is not difficult to find the details. Take for example node_memory_KReclaimable_bytes. 'Bytes' suffix is obviously the unit, node_memory is just a namespace prefix, and KReclaimable is the actual metric name. Using man -K KReclaimable will bring you to the proc(5) man page, where you can find that:
KReclaimable %lu (since Linux 4.20)
Kernel allocations that the kernel will attempt to
reclaim under memory pressure. Includes
SReclaimable (below), and other direct allocations
with a shrinker.
Finally, if this intention to learn more about the metrics is inspired by the desire to configure alerts for your hardware, you can skip to the last part and grab some alerts shared by the community from here: https://awesome-prometheus-alerts.grep.to/rules#host-and-hardware

Running python3 multiprocessing job with slurm makes lots of core.###### files. What are they?

So I have a python3 job that is being run by slurm. The python job uses lots of multiprocessing, generating about 20 or so threads. The code is far from perfect, uses lots of memory, and occasionally reaches some unexpected data and throws an error. That in itself is not a problem, I don't need every one of the 20 process to complete.
The issue is that sometimes something is causing the program to create files named like core.356729, (the number after the dot changes), and these files are massive! Like GB of data. Eventually I end up with so many that I don't have any disk space left and all my jobs are stopped. I can't tell what they are, their contents are not human readable. Google searches for "core files slurm" or "core.number files" are not giving anything relevant.
The quick and dirty solution would be just to add a process that deletes these files as soon as they appear. But I'd rather understand why they are being created first.
Does anyone know what would create a file of the format "core.######"? Is there a name for this type of file? Is there any way to identify which slurm job created the file?
Those are core dump files used for debugging. They're essentially the contents of memory for the process that crashed. You can disable their creation with ulimit -c 0

Daemon for file watching / reporting in the whole UNIX OS

I have to write a Unix/Linux daemon, which should watch for particular set of files (e.g. *.log) in any of the file directories, across various locations and report it to me. Then I have to read all the newly modified files and then I have to process them and push grepped data into Elasticsearch.
Any suggestion on how this can be achieved?
I tried various Perl modules (e.g. File::ChangeNotify, File::Monitor) but for these I need to specify the directories, which I don't want: I need the list of files to be dynamically generated and I also need the content.
Is there any method that I can call OS system calls for file creation and then read the newly generated/modified file?
Not as easy as it sounds unfortunately. You have hooks to inotify (on some platforms) that let you trigger an event on a particular inode changing.
But for wider scope changing, you're really talking about audit and accounting tracking - this isn't a small topic though - not a lot of people do auditing, and there's a reason for that. It's complicated and very platform specific (even different versions of Linux do it differently). Your favourite search engine should be able to help you find answers relevant to your platform.
It may be simpler to run a scheduled task in cron - but not too frequently, because spinning a filesystem like that is dirty - along with File::Find or similar to just run a search occasionally.

How to monitor a process in Linux CPU, Memory and time

How can I benchmark a process in Linux? I need something like "top" and "time" put together for a particular process name (it is a multiprocess program so many PIDs will be given)?
Moreover I would like to have a plot over time of memory and cpu usage for these processes and not just final numbers.
Any ideas?
I typically throw together a simple script for this type of work.
Take a look at the kernel documentation for the proc filesystem (Google 'linux proc.txt').
The first line of /proc/stat (Section 1.8 in proc.txt) will give you cumulative cpu usage stats (i.e. user, nice, system, idle, ...). For each process, the file /proc/$PID/stat (Table 1-4 in proc.txt) will provide you with both process-specific cpu usage stats and memory usage stats (see rss).
If you google a bit you'll find plenty of detailed info on these files, and pointers to libraries / apps / code snippets that can help you obtain / derive the values you need. With that in mind, I'll focus on the high-level strategy.
For CPU stats, use your favorite scripting language to create an executable that takes a set of process ids for monitoring. At a fixed interval (ex: 1 second) poll / calculate the cumulative totals for each process and the system as a whole. During each poll interval, write all results on a single line to stdout.
For memory stats, write a similar script, but simply log the per-process memory usage. Memory is a bit easier as we directly obtain the instantaneous values.
Run these script for the duration of your test, passing the set of processes ids that you'd like to monitor and redirecting its output to a log file.
./logcpu $(pidof foo) $(pidof bar) > cpustats
./logmem $(pidof foo) $(pidof bar) > memstats
Import the contents of these files into a spreadsheet (for certain applications this is as easy as copy / paste). For CPU, you are after instantaneous values but have cumulative values, so you'll need to do some minor spreadsheet work to derive these values (it's just the delta 't(x + 1) - t(x)'). Of course you could have your cpu logger write the delta, but you'll be spending a bit more time up front on the script.
Finally, use your spreadsheet to generate a nice plot.
Following are the tools for monitoring a linux system
System commands like top, free -m, vmstat, iostat, iotop, sar, netstat, etc. Nothing comes near these linux utility when you are debugging a problem. These command give you a clear picture that is going inside your server
SeaLion: Agent executes all the commands mentioned in #1 (also user defined) and outputs of these commands can be accessed in a beautiful web interface. This tool comes handy when you are debugging across hundreds of servers as installation is clear simple. And its FREE
Nagios: It is the mother of all monitoring/alerting tools. It is very much customization but very much difficult to setup for beginners. There are sets of tools called nagios plugins that covers pretty much all important Linux metrics
Munin
Server Density: A cloudbased paid service that collects important Linux metrics and gives users ability to write own plugins.
New Relic: Another well know hosted monitoring service.
Zabbix

How To Log CPU, Memory, Bandwidth for a process on Linux?

I am looking to log the CPU, Memory, Bandwidth for a process running on Linux. Ultimately the data will be stored in a database, but my main question is how to get access to this data to log in the first place.
My initial thought is to use the top command, and parse the data I need.
Can you think of a better way?
Check out the /proc pseudo filesystem—you can read the files in there from scripts, compiled programs, anywhere.
I have already implemented a similar system and used 'sar' extensively, parsing the output using 'awk', however 'perl', 'python', or any such would work just as well. I made each of these scripts output CSV and then bulk-loaded the CSVs into MySQL for later querying/charting via PHP.
You may use ps for CPU and Memory, something like:
ps -eo pid,user,args,%mem,%cpu
and then parse output.
The kernel can be configured to do this with "process accounting". A web search for that and "linux" will find a wealth of information on how to set it up.

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