[Planetlab-users] new CoMon features for queries, scripting

[Vivek Pai]

Many of you may be familiar with CoMon
(http://comon.cs.princeton.edu/status), which is a
monitoring tool that provides node and slice information
across PlanetLab nodes. Up until now, its use has mostly
been passive, since there was no query facility provided.
That's now changed.

CoMon now supports the ability to specify C-style queries
to select data, as well as the ability to sort and prune
the results in various ways. An example page showing some
of these queries is available at

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~vivek/comonfun.html

These examples show how one might use it to select
non-problematic nodes with low load in order to pick
candidates for deploying an experiment.

Our main motivation was to make it easier to use CoMon
within scripts, the way most of our own services are
maintained. We're soliciting feedback to make the tool
more useful to others as well. Please send your comments,
suggestions, etc., to princeton_comon at slices.planet-lab.org

The current version only has this support for the
node-centric data, not the slice-centric information. We
plan to incorporate support into the slice-centric data
soon.