Active monitoring
There are quite a few activities to monitor in OpenStack. In general, there are three major areas to monitor:
- OpenStack services (required for orchestration and provisioning)
- Processes (the actual running processes of OpenStack components)
- HA control cluster (the components providing HA capability to the cloud)
Services
Checking services is all about availability. If a service is down, cloud users will be faced with errors that prevent them from using the APIs and, furthermore, interacting with the cloud. These service checks should be performed regularly using simulated transactions generated from the monitoring platform. We call these simulated because they do not require all the specific customizations of the image and post-deployment configuration that may be needed for real workloads. While using real workloads is possible, it is less desirable due to the additional overhead needed to run actual transactions on a regular basis, in addition to the real deployment load. Synthetic...