OpenStack Canary

Overview

Canary is a simple OpenStack Nova service which can be used to expose system-level monitoring information via the API and a Horizon dashboard for administrators.

It depends on python-rrdtool, collectd, and python-nova.

Installation

To install Canary, clone the repository and run:

python setup.py install

Setting up API extensions

You should add the Canary extension to your nova.conf in order to expose the API:

osapi_compute_extension=nova.api.openstack.compute.contrib.standard_extensions
osapi_compute_extension=canary.extension.Canary_extension

Next, you should restart the API server.

restart nova-api

Setting up collectd

Canary relies on collectd running locally to gather system statistics. You will need to enable the rrd plugin in /etc/collectd/collectd.conf by appending or uncommenting the following lines:

LoadPlugin rrdtool

<Plugin rrdtool>
    DataDir "/var/lib/collectd/rrd"
</Plugin>

Setting up the service

Canary comes with an upstart script for automatically starting on upstart-based systems. To start canary manually, use:

start canary

If you use a non-standard RRD path for collectd, you can change the path by the config option canary_rrdpath in /etc/nova/nova.conf. It will default to the path /var/lib/collectd/rrd/{fqdn}, where {fqdn} is the hostname.domainname of the host.

[DEFAULT]
canary_rrdpath=/var/lib/collectd/rrd/{fqdn}

Similarly, you may change the Canary topic, although it's unlikely you will need to.

[DEFAULT]
canary_topic=canary

Setting up the dashboard

To enable the Canary dashboard in Horizon, modify /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings.py and add the following lines:

import sys
mod = sys.modules['openstack_dashboard.settings']
mod.INSTALLED_APPS += ('canary.horizon',)

Then, restart the web server with service apache2 restart and navigate to Horizon. There will be a new dashboard labeled "Canary".

Also add your default instance and host metrics to /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings.py. For example:

HORIZON_CONFIG['canary_default_vm_metrics'] = [
    'libvirt*',
]

HORIZON_CONFIG['canary_default_host_metrics'] = [
    'load.load',
    'memory.memory-used',
    'df.df-root',
    'interface.if_octets-br100',
]