OpenStack Ceilometer – Monitoring, Metering, and Alarming

📖 Detailed Content

1. What is Ceilometer?

Ceilometer is OpenStack’s telemetry service, designed to collect usage and performance data across compute, storage, and networking. It enables:

• Monitoring: Resource utilization and performance

• Metering: Usage data for billing and chargeback

• Alarming: Triggering alerts based on thresholds

2. Ceilometer Architecture

• Data Collectors: Gather metrics from Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Swift, etc.

• Message Bus: Transports collected data (usually RabbitMQ or Kafka)

• Database: Stores metrics (MongoDB, Gnocchi, or SQL)

• API Service: Provides access to telemetry data

• Integration: Works with Aodh (alarming) and Gnocchi (time-series storage)

3. Key Metrics Collected

• Compute: CPU utilization, memory usage, disk I/O

• Storage: Volume size, read/write operations

• Network: Bandwidth usage, packet counts

• Image Service: Upload/download statistics

4. Sample CLI Queries

bash

# List meters

openstack meter list

# Show statistics for CPU utilization

openstack statistics show --meter cpu_util --period 600

# Create alarm (via Aodh)

openstack alarm create --name cpu_high \

  --meter-name cpu_util \

  --threshold 80 \

  --comparison-operator gt \

  --period 600 \

  --evaluation-periods 1 \

  --alarm-action 'http://notify.rshnetwork.com/alarm'

5. Use Cases

6. Best Practices

• Use Gnocchi for scalable time-series storage

• Integrate with Aodh for alarms and notifications

• Secure telemetry APIs with TLS and RBAC

• Monitor message bus health (RabbitMQ/Kafka)

• Automate reporting with dashboards (Grafana, Kibana)

👉Visit RSH Network for practical insights into modern IT technologies.https://rshnetwork.com/

👉Get expert cloud and security services to scale your infrastructure securely.https://rshnetwork.com/services

👉Start your learning journey with industry-focused IT courses today.https://rshnetwork.com/courses