Open Stack

Hi ceilometer team,

I can't make the meeting (it's 2am for me). But thought I could
put some ideas down in email.

At the moment Heat has some CloudWatch'like functionality to achieve
it's HA and autoscaling.
I think this should be in ceilometer, not necessary the AWS api but
something roughly equivalent.

What can you do with the CloudWatch api?
----------------------------------------
- enable/disable what ever metrics are available on your resources
   (minimum of 60 sec sample periods)
- retrieve them (for up to 7 days after they were generated)
- create/delete alarms based on your metrics (like alarm if metricX > 50)
- view alarm history
- generate data for custom metrics (by posting to the rest api)
- change the state of the alarm manually (for debugging)
- send alarms to either a autoscaling or messaging queue.

What can you achieve with CloudWatch?
-------------------------------------
- autoscaling: alarm on high/low cpu/disk/mem/<whatever> and trigger
   new instances to be created/destroyed/resized.
- service monitoring and HA: send data to custom metrics about service
   health (httpd/mysqld/...) and act on it automatically.
- extensible (by the end user) statistics gathering. So using the custom
   metrics simply monitor something special on your instance.
- Be quickly alerted of important events on your instances
   (via the messaging queue) - we haven't done anything with this in Heat.
- diagnostics: I think statistics is an important part of diagnostics both
   to the user and administrator.

Why put it in ceilometer?
-------------------------
- expertise: put code of a common topic in one place where experts
   in that area can congregate (ceilometer == all things statistics)
- code reuse: I think there is a large common ground here
   (make use of the pollsters to get metering and general statistics).

Some potential issues:
----------------------
- increased volume of gathered statistics data (1 hourly -> 60 sec).
[any more ...]  


I could do a talk about it at summit if need be, but it's worth
throwing ideas about it now I think.

Note: Steven Dake will be at the ceilometer meeting to anwser any
questions about Heat or CloudWatch.


References:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/DeveloperGuide/Welcome.html
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/APIReference/Welcome.html

Not sure if rackspace is going to (or has) opensource it's monitoring solution? Anyone?
http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/monitoring/howitworks/


Regards
Angus Salkeld