The excitement around OpenStack is palpable. The conferences dedicated to the software are easily oversubscribed. Lots of analysts and bloggers alike are writing about the software, its adoption and pros (and cons). Most importantly, many IT visionaries have started deploying OpenStack in their data centers.
Foglight for Virtualization is re-asserting its leadership by being the first to offer a complete new solution to monitor the OpenStack and KVM hypervisor environment.
One of the main uses for OpenStack right now is establishing a private cloud in the data center. The workloads in this case are not very different than what usually goes on VMware. But there are definitely DevOps and big data use cases that are popping up more and more with OpenStack.
Use of OpenStack for establishing private cloud using KVM hypervisor lets customers establish the departmental clouds, dramatically increase automation thus improving IT productivity, while at the same time mitigate vendor lock-in to reduce costs.
But use of OpenStack has its own challenges. Using OpenStack without a proven monitoring solution creates many problems for the administrators. The top concerns voiced by the administrators and architects that we talked to were:
- Dynamic performance and availability information
- Real-time information on workload placement and movement.
- Historical data analysis to understand usage trends
Apart from this, the other asks were capacity planning, migration planning and chargeback.
Foglight for OpenStack extends Foglight’s industry-leading performance monitoring and analysis capabilities to OpenStack. The innovative solution connects to OpenStack services to collect configuration and performance information. Foglight for OpenStack monitors services (one or more instances that combine to form an instance of OpenStack cloud) that provide Compute, Networking and Storage services as well as KeyStone service that authenticates. Together, availability and performance of these services will result in actual perceived performance of OpenStack infrastructure.
Administrators are able to answer questions like service uptime status, available resources to service requests that are sent to them and version information.
Administrators also get information about hypervisors, templates and networks defined. This information (in dashboard form in a NOC environment or sent as a report) is crucial to ensure smooth functioning of the cloud.
The main dashboard with drill-down capabilities shows the actual cloud constructs and hypervisors, storage and workloads performance. The information shown here comes from underlying hypervisors and instances (VMs). The information is aggregated for cloud constructs like Availability Zones defined in OpenStack and presented. Because OpenStack configuration is dynamic and can change anytime, Foglight keeps track of this information and updates the dashboards. Without this dynamic perspective, keeping track of VMs and hypervisors can be difficult.
The drill-down capabilities in Foglight allows administrators to start looking at performance problems at whatever level is appropriate and then follow the trail to reach root-cause of the problem.
Helpfully, the dashboard also shows top performance hotspots that can be good starting points.
Foglight for OpenStack offers another very important feature over any other tool available (free or otherwise). Foglight has a built-in relationship engine that can create topology maps of any “related” objects.
In a dynamic and potential large environment like OpenStack, topology information is crucial. Knowing the infrastructure that the VM is running on at all times and all other related VMs that are sharing that same infrastructure can go a long way in understanding resource use and pain points.
This Unique topology view dashboard also shows alert status of each of the objects. That way, an administrator can know at a glance where the focus is needed in real-time. This not only makes the administrator proactive and saves lot of resources; it also leads to increased operational efficiency.
Foglight for OpenStack is amongst the first few to support OpenStack monitoring. It allows OpenStack administrators easy to use monitoring tools to keep track of workloads running in their private clouds. It provides near real-time and historical performance analysis to help IT operations efficient.
This is really just the beginning. We have already started to work on the next additions to the solution. Optimization – where Foglight will suggest right-sizes for the VMs and reclaim wasted resources – is in works. So is Capacity management and chargeback additions to make sense of usage trends and growth characteristics of the cloud.