OpenStack observability with Sovereign Cloud Stack

Guard Duty

From Health Monitor to CloudMon

OpenStack Health Monitor is an important component for the SCS project. The program relies on the OpenStack API to cover various scenarios and assess the functionality of an OpenStack cloud from a customer perspective.

The OpenStack Health Monitor periodically installs virtual machines, creates load balancers, and checks the availability of these components. It also logs runtimes so that changes such as delayed provisioning of virtual machines can be tracked. This feature is especially helpful when changes are made to the system environment, such as after an upgrade to OpenStack components, to help identify problems – ideally before end users notice them.

The OpenStack Health Monitor first saw the light of day more than four years ago in the Open Telekom Cloud (OTC). The project was initiated then by Kurt Garloff, who is the current CTO of the SCS project. Colleagues at OTC have since further developed the OpenStack Health Monitor for their environment and presented the resulting APIMon project at the OpenInfra Summit 2020 [9].

Following OpenInfra Summit 2022, APIMon developers met with members of the SCS community to consider how to collaborate on the next iteration. The intent was to develop and maintain an independent successor project, CloudMon, to serve as a reference for behavior-driven monitoring.

Outlook

One of the next priorities for the Monitoring SIG will be to expand log management. Kolla Ansible currently provides a fluentd daemon along with ElasticSearch for log shipping. Especially in terms of compliance requirements in the CSP environment (think audit logging), an installed SCS environment would ideally already include appropriate underpinnings. It would provide SCS operators best practices for aggregating relevant log messages, such as those relating to attempted logins processed by Keycloak.

The reference implementation of the Sovereign Cloud Stack can be easily put through its paces in the OSISM testbed [10], and it also provides a good introduction to the project. All meetings related to SCS can be viewed on the project website under Contribute to SCS [11]. SCS is currently looking for developers to join the community.

Infos

SCS: https://scs.community/
OSISM: https://osism.tech/
Kolla Ansible: https://docs.openstack.org/kolla-ansible/latest/
Prometheus: https://prometheus.io
Alertmanager best practices: https://github.com/SovereignCloudStack/Docs/blob/main/Operational-Docs/integrating-alertmanager.md
Alerta: https://alerta.io
Awesome alert rules: https://awesome-prometheus-alerts.grep.to
OVN exporter: https://github.com/greenpau/ovn_exporter
Keynote on APIMon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em8TfiUlXF4
OSISM testbed: https://docs.osism.tech/testbed/
Contribute to SCS: https://scs.community/contribute/

The Author

Felix Kronlage-Dammers has been building open source IT infrastructure since the late 1990s. Between then and now, he was part of various open source development communities, from DarwinPorts to OpenDarwin to OpenBSD and, nowadays, the Sovereign Cloud Stack. His interests range from monitoring and observability over infrastructure as code to building and scaling communities and companies. He has been part of the extended board of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) for six years and describes himself as a Unix/open source nerd. If not working, he is usually found on a road bike.

« Previous 1 2 3