NCA-AIIO - AI Operations - Section 3.3

Articulate key measures and criteria for monitoring GPUs.

Articulate the key GPU health and performance metrics to monitor, including GPU utilisation, memory utilisation, temperature, power draw, and SM activity, typically exposed via NVIDIA Management Library (NVML) and tools such as nvidia-smi or DCGM. Recognise how these metrics reveal underutilised hardware, thermal throttling, or impending hardware failures in production.

Practice question for this objective

Free sampleAI Operationsmedium

During a large distributed training job, one GPU node begins reporting elevated GPU memory errors and reduced throughput compared to its peers. From a cluster health-monitoring perspective, which action best addresses early detection of this type of degradation before it causes a job failure?

  • AIncrease the batch size on the affected node to verify whether performance recovers under a heavier load.
  • BConfigure threshold-based alerts on GPU memory error counters and utilisation metrics so the operations team is notified while the node can still be investigated gracefully. Correct
  • CRely on the training framework to raise an out-of-memory exception when the fault becomes critical.
  • DRestart the GPU driver on the affected node immediately without capturing any telemetry.
Explain how threshold-based alerting on GPU health metrics enables proactive cluster management before job failures occur. Effective cluster health monitoring involves defining alert thresholds on telemetry signals such as GPU memory error rates and sustained utilisation outliers. When a node crosses a threshold, the operations team receives notification while the node is still functional, allowing it to be cordoned and investigated without a hard job failure. This contrasts with reactive approaches that wait for framework exceptions or restart services without capturing diagnostic context. DCGM and compatible monitoring stacks (such as Prometheus with Alertmanager) support this alerting pattern natively.

Why A is wrong: Increasing batch size adds memory pressure and compute load to a node already showing degraded behaviour, which is likely to accelerate failure rather than diagnose or resolve it.

Why B is correct: Threshold-based alerting on telemetry counters such as GPU memory errors enables proactive intervention - draining the node, running diagnostics, and replacing hardware - before a job failure propagates across the cluster.

Why C is wrong: Waiting for a framework-level exception is reactive, not proactive; by that point the job has already failed and cluster time has been wasted, which is precisely what health monitoring aims to prevent.

Why D is wrong: Restarting the driver without first capturing telemetry discards diagnostic information and does not confirm whether the issue is transient or indicative of hardware failure requiring node replacement.

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