Nvidia SMI and CrateDB Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Nvidia SMI Plugin enables the retrieval of detailed statistics about NVIDIA GPUs attached to the host system, providing essential insights for performance monitoring.

The CrateDB plugin facilitates the writing of metrics to a CrateDB database, leveraging its PostgreSQL-compatible protocol to ensure a seamless experience for users.

Integration details

Nvidia SMI

The Nvidia SMI Plugin is designed to gather metrics regarding the performance and status of NVIDIA GPUs on the host machine. By leveraging the capabilities of the nvidia-smi command-line tool, this plugin pulls crucial information such as GPU memory utilization, temperature, fan speed, and various performance metrics. This data is essential for monitoring GPU health and performance in real-time, particularly in environments where GPU performance directly impacts computing tasks, such as machine learning, 3D rendering, and high-performance computing. The plugin provides flexibility by allowing users to specify the path to the nvidia-smi binary and configure polling timeouts, accommodating both Linux and Windows systems where the nvidia-smi tool is commonly located. With its ability to collect detailed statistics on each GPU, this plugin becomes a vital resource for any infrastructure relying on NVIDIA hardware, facilitating proactive management and performance tuning.

CrateDB

This plugin writes to CrateDB via its PostgreSQL protocol, allowing for metrics to be efficiently stored in a scalable database. CrateDB is designed for high-speed analytics, supporting time-series data and complicated queries, making it ideal for applications that require fast ingestion and analysis of large datasets. By utilizing the PostgreSQL protocol, the CrateDB output plugin ensures compatibility with existing PostgreSQL client libraries and tools, enabling a smooth integration for users who are already familiar with PostgreSQL’s ecosystem. The plugin provides options such as automatic table creation, connection parameters, and query timeouts, offering flexibility in how metrics are handled and stored within the database.

Configuration

Nvidia SMI

[[inputs.nvidia_smi]]
  ## Optional: path to nvidia-smi binary, defaults "/usr/bin/nvidia-smi"
  ## We will first try to locate the nvidia-smi binary with the explicitly specified value (or default value),
  ## if it is not found, we will try to locate it on PATH(exec.LookPath), if it is still not found, an error will be returned
  # bin_path = "/usr/bin/nvidia-smi"

  ## Optional: timeout for GPU polling
  # timeout = "5s"

CrateDB

[[outputs.cratedb]]
  ## Connection parameters for accessing the database see
  ##   https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/jackc/pgx/v4#ParseConfig
  ## for available options
  url = "postgres://user:password@localhost/schema?sslmode=disable"

  ## Timeout for all CrateDB queries.
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## Name of the table to store metrics in.
  # table = "metrics"

  ## If true, and the metrics table does not exist, create it automatically.
  # table_create = false

  ## The character(s) to replace any '.' in an object key with
  # key_separator = "_"

Input and output integration examples

Nvidia SMI

1. Real-Time GPU Monitoring for ML Training: Continuously monitor the GPU utilization and memory usage during machine learning model training. This enables data scientists to ensure that their GPUs are not being overutilized or underutilized, optimizing resource allocation and reviewing performance bottlenecks in real-time.

2. Automated Alerts for Overheating GPUs: Implement a system using the Nvidia SMI plugin to track GPU temperatures and set alerts for instances where temperatures exceed safe thresholds. This proactive monitoring can prevent hardware damage and improve system reliability by alerting administrators to potential cooling issues before they result in failure.

3. Performance Baselines for GPU Resources: Establish baseline performance metrics for your GPU resources. By regularly collecting data and analyzing trends in GPU usage, organizations can identify anomalies and optimize their workloads accordingly, leading to enhanced operational efficiency.

4. Dockerized GPU Usage Insights: In a containerized environment, use the plugin to monitor GPU performance from within a Docker container. This allows developers to track GPU performance of their applications in production, facilitating troubleshooting and performance optimization within isolated environments.

CrateDB

1. Real-Time Analytics for IoT Devices: Collect and store metrics from thousands of IoT devices. By setting up a dynamic metrics table for each device, users can perform real-time analytics on the collected data, enabling quick insights into device performance, patterns, and potential failures. This setup benefits from CrateDB’s ability to handle high-throughput data ingestion while providing the necessary analytics capabilities to derive actionable insights.

2. Website Performance Monitoring: Track key performance metrics from web applications, such as request latency and user activity. By storing metrics in CrateDB, teams can leverage the power of SQL-like queries to analyze traffic patterns, user engagement, and server performance over time, leading to optimized application performance and enhanced user experiences.

3. Financial Transaction Analysis: Manage large volumes of financial transaction data for real-time fraud detection and analysis. With CrateDB’s scalable infrastructure, users can store, query, and analyze transaction metrics efficiently, allowing for the detection of anomalies and illicit activities based on transaction patterns and trends.

Feedback

Thank you for being part of our community! If you have any general feedback or found any bugs on these pages, we welcome and encourage your input. Please submit your feedback in the InfluxDB community Slack.