Node Commands#

In this section, we will review the most important commands to monitor the cluster. We assume that the system administrator has installed the cluster and that you successfully executed the grbcluster login command with the appropriate flags to access your cluster.

Listing Cluster Nodes#

The nodes command provides a list of nodes in the cluster, along with status information. This command is a shortcut for the node list command. For example:

> grbcluster nodes
ID       ADDRESS       STATUS TYPE    LICENSE PROCESSING #Q #R JL IDLE %MEM  %CPU
b7d037db server1:61000 ALIVE  COMPUTE VALID   ACCEPTING  0  0  10 19m  15.30 5.64
735c595f server2:61000 ALIVE  COMPUTE VALID   ACCEPTING  0  0  10 19m  10.45 8.01

Add the —-describe flag to see an explanation of each field:

> grbcluster nodes --describe

ID        - Unique node ID, use --long to display full ID
ADDRESS   - Node address
STATUS    - Node status (ALIVE, FAILED, JOINING, LEAVING, DEGRADED)
TYPE      - Node type (COMPUTE: Compute Server, WORKER: Distributed Worker)
GRP       - Group name for job affinity (not displayed if empty or restricted)
LICENSE   - License status (N/A, VALID, INVALID, EXPIRED)
PROCESSING- Processing state (ACCEPTING, DRAINING, STOPPED)
#Q        - Number of jobs in queue
#R        - Number of jobs running
JL        - Job Limit (maximum number of running jobs)
IDLE      - Idle time since the last job execution (in minutes)
%MEM      - Percentage of memory currently used on the machine
%CPU      - Percentage of CPU currently used on the machine
STARTED   - Node start time, use --long
RUNTIMES  - Deployed runtime versions, use --long
VERSION   - Remote Services Agent version, use --long

Troubleshooting Connectivity Issues#

You can test to see if a Remote Services node is reachable with the node ping command:

> grbcluster node ping --server=server1
Node is not reachable

The node latency command provides additional details:

> grbcluster node latency
ADDRESS              LATENCY    NBERR
server1      1.12813ms  0
server2      1.218103ms 0

This will display the latency from the client machine to each node in the cluster.

Add the —-describe flag to see an explanation of each field:

> grbcluster node latency --describe
ADDRESS   - Node address
LATENCY   - latency between the local client and a node
NBERR     - Number of errors

Listing Cluster Licenses#

The node licenses command displays license status information for each node in a cluster:

> grbcluster node licenses
ID       ADDRESS   STATUS TYPE     KEY   EXP ORG    USER APP VER CS    DL  ERROR
eb07fe16 server1   VALID  NODE               gurobi          8   true  0
b7d037db server2   VALID  NODE               gurobi          8   true  0

Add the —-describe flag to see an explanation of each field:

> grbcluster node licenses --describe
ID        - Unique node ID, use --long to display full ID
ADDRESS   - Node address
STATUS    - License status (N/A, VALID, INVALID, EXPIRED)
TYPE      - License type
KEY       - License Cloud Key (not displayed if empty or restricted)
EXP       - License expiration
VER       - Maximum runtime version supported
CS        - Indicate if Compute Server features are enabled
DL        - Maximum number of workers for a distributed job (Distributed Limit)
ORG       - Assigned organization
USER      - Assigned username
APP       - Assigned application name
ERROR     - License error message

If a node has an INVALID license, you can run the following command to learn more:

> grbcluster node licenses
ID       ADDRESS STATUS  TYPE KEY EXP ORG USER APP VER CS    DL  ERROR
eb07fe16 server1 INVALID NODE                          false 0   No Gurobi license found...

Note that the node licenses command can be used at any time to check the validity and attributes of licenses on all the nodes of the cluster (expiration date, distributed limit, etc.).

Changing the Job Limit#

Each node of a Remote Services has a job limit, which indicates the maximum number of jobs that can be run simultaneously on that node. This job limit can be changed using the grbcluster node config command, together with the —-job-limit= flag. For example, to change the job limit to 5:

> grbcluster node config --job-limit=5

Changes to the job limit parameter only apply to the specified node; other nodes in the cluster are unaffected. Once changed, the new value will persist, even if you stop and restart the node.

Recall that you can run the nodes command to view the current job limit for each node in a cluster:

> grbcluster nodes
ID       ADDRESS       STATUS TYPE    LICENSE PROCESSING #Q #R JL IDLE %MEM  %CPU
b7d037db server1:61000 ALIVE  COMPUTE VALID   ACCEPTING  0  0  2  19m  15.30 5.64
735c595f server2:61000 ALIVE  COMPUTE VALID   ACCEPTING  0  0  2  19m  10.45 8.01

The JL column shows the job limit, which is 2 for both nodes in the cluster in this example.

We can change the limit for one node:

> grbcluster node config --server=server1:61000 --job-limit=5

By rerunning the nodes command, we can see that the limit for server1 has been changed to 5:

> grbcluster nodes
ID       ADDRESS       STATUS TYPE    LICENSE PROCESSING #Q #R JL IDLE %MEM  %CPU
b7d037db server1:61000 ALIVE  COMPUTE VALID   ACCEPTING  0  0  5  19m  15.30 5.64
735c595f server2:61000 ALIVE  COMPUTE VALID   ACCEPTING  0  0  2  19m  10.45 8.01