Automated Grid Monitoring for the LHCb Experiment Through HammerCloud

The HammerCloud system is used by CERN IT to monitor the status of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). HammerCloud automatically submits jobs to WLCG computing resources, closely replicating the workflow of Grid users (e.g. physicists analyzing data). This allows computation nodes and storage resources to be monitored, software to be tested (somewhat like continuous integration), and new sites to be stress tested with a heavy job load before commissioning. The HammerCloud system has been in use for ATLAS and CMS experiments for about five years. This summer's work involved porting the HammerCloud suite of tools to the LHCb experiment. The HammerCloud software runs functional tests and provides data visualizations. HammerCloud's LHCb variant is written in Python, using the Django web framework and Ganga/DIRAC for job management.