This page covers how we watch Gaudi clusters day to day: what collects the data, what it measures, how alerts reach us, and where to look when something needs investigating.
We use the same monitoring stack for Gaudi as we do for our NVIDIA fleet. The only Gaudi-specific piece is the data collector at the start of the chain.
Gaudi accelerators
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habana-exporter (reads hardware stats off each Gaudi card)
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Prometheus (stores the metrics over time)
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Grafana dashboards (visualizes them for humans)
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Alertmanager (decides who gets notified, and how)
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PagerDuty / Slack (where the actual alert lands)
What each piece does, in plain terms:
If a node stops reporting metrics, this is the first thing to check.
# Start the exporter manually if it isn't already running habana-exporter --port 9000 & # Confirm it's serving metrics curl http://localhost:9000/metrics | grep habana
If the curl command returns nothing, the exporter itself is the problem, not the accelerator. That's a different fix (restart the exporter service) than a genuine hardware fault.
These are the specific Prometheus metrics habana-exporter exposes, and the thresholds that trigger an alert:
| Metric | What it measures | Alert threshold |
|---|---|---|
habana_aip_temperature | Accelerator die temperature (°C) | Warn above 85°C, critical above 95°C |
habana_memory_used | HBM memory used (bytes) | Warn above 90% of capacity |
habana_aip_power_draw | Power draw (Watts) | Warn above 95% of rated TDP |
habana_aip_ecc_errors_correctable | Correctable memory errors | Warn above 200 per day |
habana_aip_ecc_errors_uncorrectable | Uncorrectable memory errors | Any at all triggers an alert (card should be retired) |
habana_aip_nic_rx_errors | Network receive errors on the onboard RoCEv2 ports | Any at all triggers an alert |
habana_aip_nic_tx_errors | Network transmit errors on the onboard RoCEv2 ports | Any at all triggers an alert |
These map directly to the health baselines covered on Everyday Health Checks; this page is about how the data gets collected and surfaced, that page is about what “normal vs. urgent” looks like operationally.
| Severity | We acknowledge within | We respond within |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | 15 minutes | 30 minutes |
| Warning | 1 hour | 2 hours |
| Info | Next business day | N/A |
Target: the cluster stays available at least 99.5% of the time, measured monthly.
How severity is decided: Alertmanager routes based on the metric and threshold that fired, not a manual judgment call. Anything tied to card health (temperature, ECC errors, power) or network link loss is Critical or Warning by default; slower-moving things like capacity trending toward a limit are typically Info.
When a node needs deeper investigation than the dashboards give you, these are the actual log locations and commands:
| Source | Location / Command | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Driver/kernel logs | /var/log/habanalabs/ | Driver-level errors, firmware load failures |
| Kernel ring buffer | dmesg \| grep -i habana | Low-level hardware events the kernel logged |
| systemd service logs | journalctl -u habanalabs* | Whether the driver service itself started/stopped cleanly |
| Extended diagnostics | habana-validate output | A full self-test of the card and its fabric connectivity |
| Container-level metrics | habana-container-toolkit Prometheus endpoint | Per-container accelerator usage, useful in Kubernetes environments |
Important: pull and archive these logs *before* draining or replacing a node. They're often the only evidence Intel will accept when we file an RMA claim, so capturing them after the node is already swapped out is too late.