Using the GraceDB Monitor

To use the monitor, one should first configure cbcflow and a library upon which the monitor will act. If you have not already done so, please see Configuration and library-setup respectively for further details.

To run the monitor, we execute the command cbcflow_monitor_make_crontab, which writes a crontab entry to run cbcflow_monitor_run at the desired interval. The flags we will use are:

cbcflow_monitor_make_crontab --config-file review-monitor.cfg --ligo-user-name rhiannon.udall \
--ligo-accounting ligo.dev.o4.cbc.explore.test --rundir `pwd` --monitor-interval 1 --monitor-minute {}

The config-file points to the configuration file being used, in case it differs from the default configuration, and --ligo-user-name and ligo-accounting have their standard meaning. --monitor-interval sets that hour interval at which the monitor will run - 1 means every hour while the default is 2, or every other hour. Finally --rundir sets the directory in which the monitor .sub and output files will reside.

The one free field here is the monitor-minute: if left empty the monitor will run on the hour, while if a value (an integer from 0 to 59) is passed the monitor will run at that minute on the hour. This primarily exists as a convenience when testing, as otherwise one may need to wait up to an hour to see the results of a test. If you wish to use this, it is recommended to add 6 to your present minute on the hour, as this will give the optimal chance of running correctly at that time.

Once you have run this, your set! The monitor will run at the requested interval through htcondor, and you can check it’s output in the monitor.err file in the run directory.