Introduction

Due to the dynamic nature of virtual infrastructure and multiple users sharing the same cloud platform, the OpenStack administrator needs to track how the tenants use the resources. In this chapter, we will look at ways to monitor the usage of virtual and physical networking resources. The resource utilization data can be used to bill the users of a public cloud and to debug infrastructure-related problems. The data can also help in capacity planning by giving an estimate of the capacity of the physical devices and trends of resource usage.

OpenStack Ceilometer project provides you with telemetry service. It can measure the usage of resources by collecting statistics across the various OpenStack components. The resource utilization data is collected over the message bus or by polling the various components. OpenStack Neutron provides Ceilometer with the statistics that are related to the virtual networks.

The following figure shows you how Ceilometer interacts with the Neutron...