CIC portal: a collaborative and scalable integration platform for high availability grid operations

EGEE, along with its sister project LCG, manages the world's largest grid production infrastructure which is spreading nowadays over 260 sites in more than 40 countries. Just as building such a system requires novel approaches; its management also requires innovation. From an operational point of view, the first challenge we face is to provide scalable procedures and tools able to monitor the ever expanding infrastructure and the constant evolution of the needs. The second is to ensure that all these tools strongly interact with one another, even though their development is spread out worldwide. Consequently, our goal is to provide a homogeneous way to access tools and analyze data for daily operational needs. To implement this concept into LCG/EGEE infrastructure management tools, 1N2P3 Computing Centre proposed a web portal, named "CIC operations portal", conceived and built as an integration platform for existing features and new requirements. Firstly, we describe the initial needs that led us to the present architecture of this portal. We then emphasize a specific feature for the operations efficiency which is the web interface dedicated to EGEE overall daily monitoring. We also deal with the high availability mechanism put in place by INFN-CNAF to address failover and replication issues. We finally present how the CIC portal has become one of the essential EGEE and LCG core services.