  Grid applications are, by their nature, wide-area distributed applications.
This WAN aspect of Grid applications makes the use of conventional monitoring
and instrumentation tools (such as top, gprof, LSF Monitor, etc) impractical
for verification that the application is running correctly and efficiently. To
be effective, monitoring data must be "end-to-end", meaning that all components
between the Grid application endpoints must be monitored. Instrumented
applications can generate a large amount of monitoring data, so typically the
instrumentation is off by default. For jobs running on a Grid, there needs to
be a general mechanism to remotely activate the instrumentation in running
jobs. The NetLogger Toolkit Activation Service provides this mechanism.
  To demonstrate this, we have instrumented the ATLAS Athena Framework with
NetLogger to generate monitoring events. We then use a GMA-based activation
service to control NetLogger's trigger mechanism. The NetLogger trigger
mechanism allows one to easily start, stop, or change the logging level of a
running program by modifying a trigger file. We present here details of the
design of the NetLogger implementation of the GMA-based activation service and
the instrumentation service for Athena. We also describe how this activation
service allows us to non-intrusively collect and visualize the ATLAS Athena
Framework monitoring data.
