Monitoring OpenStack

What is OpenStack?

If you have not come across OpenStack before, their mission statement really says it all, "to produce the ubiquitous Open Source Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds, regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.” 

Gaining massive backing from the Open Source community and from many big organizations, the project was founded by NASA and Rackspace.

The first thing you will notice when deploying and monitoring OpenStack is that its make-up involves several different components. They all fit together into a single system, but we will need to monitor each part separately.

Components

The most commonly used components and the most interesting in terms of monitoring are Nova, Neutron, Glance, Swift and Cinder.

Compute – Nova

Nova manages and automates pools of computer resources and supports a range of virtualization technologies such as VMware. Opsview has Opspacks for monitoring VMware, which allow you to monitor on each hypervisor.

Networking - Neutron

OpenStack Neutron manages networks and IP addresses, giving you complete control over the IP addresses assigned to your virtual machines and control of virtual networks.

Image Service – Glance

OpenStack Glance provides discovery, registration, and delivery services for disk and server images. 

Block Storage – Cinder

OpenStack Cinder provides block storage for use with OpenStack compute instances. Storage can be split across a whole range of devices and areas, and Cinder handles all of this for you. 

What Opsview OpenStack Opspack can monitor

We have created an Opspack to monitor the most important OpenStack components. Each of the Opspacks can collect the most important information to ensure the components are performing as expected.