Book Image

OpenStack for Architects

By : Michael Solberg, Benjamin Silverman
Book Image

OpenStack for Architects

By: Michael Solberg, Benjamin Silverman

Overview of this book

Over the last five years, hundreds of organizations have successfully implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms based on OpenStack. The huge amount of investment from these organizations, industry giants such as IBM and HP, as well as open source leaders such as Red Hat have led analysts to label OpenStack as the most important open source technology since the Linux operating system. Because of its ambitious scope, OpenStack is a complex and fast-evolving open source project that requires a diverse skill-set to design and implement it. This guide leads you through each of the major decision points that you'll face while architecting an OpenStack private cloud for your organization. At each point, we offer you advice based on the experience we've gained from designing and leading successful OpenStack projects in a wide range of industries. Each chapter also includes lab material that gives you a chance to install and configure the technologies used to build production-quality OpenStack clouds. Most importantly, we focus on ensuring that your OpenStack project meets the needs of your organization, which will guarantee a successful rollout.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Logging, monitoring, and alerting


One of the most important aspects of operating an OpenStack cloud is logging, monitoring and alerting (LMA). Since OpenStack isn’t your legacy bare metal based infrastructure platform it requires a different approach. The traditional LMA methods tend to fall short when considering the scale and elasticity of an OpenStack environment. Additionally, the old binary methods of alerting “this service is down”, “the resource is at 95%”, or even “file system full” messages do not deliver the depth of operational information really required to know the health of an OpenStack cloud.

While there are many different tools to actually monitor log events and create alerts from the systems that run the OpenStack infrastructure, in this chapter, we will focus more on the architectural principles that will help you choose logging, monitoring, and alerting tools.

No matter what is used to do the logging, monitoring, and alerting, from an architectural standpoint, the solution...