The software is used to view either live or recorded statistics covering metrics such as CPU load averages or network utilization for many nodes.

Ganglia grew out of requirements for monitoring systems by Berkeley (University of California) but now sees use by commercial and educational organisations such as Cray, MIT, NASA and Twitter.

At each node in the tree, a Ganglia Meta Daemon (gmetad) periodically polls a collection of child data sources, parses the collected XML, saves all numeric, volatile metrics to round-robin databases and exports the aggregated XML over a TCP socket to clients.

Although the web front-end to ganglia started as a simple HTML view of the XML tree, it has evolved into a system that keeps a colorful history of all collected data.

Specifically, the web front-end will open the local port 8651 (by default) and expects to receive a Ganglia XML tree.

Therefore, the Ganglia web front-end should run on a fairly powerful, dedicated machine if it presents a large amount of data.