The centralised management of distributed computing infrastructures presents a number of considerable challenges, not least of which is the effective monitoring of physical resources and middleware components to provide an accurate operational picture for use by administrative or management staff. The detection and presentation of real-time information pertaining to the performance and availability of computing resources is a difficult yet critical activity.

This architecture is intended to enhance the service monitoring experience of a Grid operations team. We have designed and implemented an extensible agent-based architecture capable of detecting and aggregating status information using low-level sensors, functionality tests and existing information systems. To date it has been successfully deployed across eighteen Grid- Ireland sites.