Open Stack

I have some personals VMs hosted  by Bytemark in the UK, and
one of the first things I noticed about their Big-V cloud is
that they provide a watchdog device to their instances, which
is nice. Their traditional non-cloud virtual hosting setup also
has a monitoring capability with email alerts. This makes me
think about how such features could be supported in OpenStack.

Superficially it seems quite straightforward. I imagine some setting
against the instance flavors which would indicate whether the flavor
enables a watchdog device + the action to take when it triggers. I've
written up a quick outline of a way todo that here:

  http://wiki.openstack.org/LibvirtWatchdog

And filed a blueprint to go with it

  https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/libvirt-watchdog

NB, the blueprint has 'libvirt' in the name since that's the driver
I'd do an implementation for, but the concepts/properties outlined
are generic enough to work for other compute drivers too should any
other maintainers wish to implement it in their compute driver.

Configuring a watchdog is only half the problem though. As an end
user I really want to have some kind of notification when the watchdog
triggers. For example, I'd like to receive an email alert or a text
message alert on my mobile phone.

I could well be wrong, but AFAIK, OpenStack has no current facility
for getting this kind of notification out to end users ? Is anything
thinking about / working on this kind of thing ?  Obviously it is not
really something that is specific to watchdog devices, I could imagine
a variety of reasons to need to notify users about operation of their
instances. Thoughts ?

Regards,
Daniel
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