Profiling the cloud

The OpenStack ecosystem is composed of multiple services that connect with each other to fulfill a request. In some cases, a request can be processed extremely slowly and fail. If the rate of request failures keeps increasing, cloud operators must investigate and understand the root cause of the issue. Monitoring, debugging, and logging tools can partially be the answer to such scenarios, but they lack a request flow mechanism. A tiny but great tool has been developed in the OpenStack ecosystem named OSProfiler, which focuses on service tracing. OSProfiler provides a view of requests as they travel through different OpenStack services and compiles data to be visualized in a timeline graph. Cloud operators can determine bottlenecks in the OpenStack deployment and improve its performance by comparing trace sets with different conditions. The OSProfiler tool is capable of providing valuable insights and tracing data that captures the response time of APIs, databases...