Open Stack

Hey Tim!

Thanks for the mention. I'm keen to hear the responses on this as
well.

I haven't been very active on the ML recently, so perhaps it's a good time
for an update (or an intro for those not familiar with StackTach [1])

StackTach started out as a diagnostics tool. It consumes notifications
from Nova and Glance and gives you tools for watching "operations" as
they flow through the system. An operation might be "create instance",
or "migrate" or "add network", etc. Pretty handy stuff. Especially if
you're in the process of standing up a new OpenStack deploy.

We quickly found we could get some other really cool information from
these notifications. Performance monitoring, auditing, billing and
usage data ... lots of cool stuff. Within Rax we have StackTach
deployed in all of our regions and use it for all these purposes.

StackTach doesn't really compare with Ceilometer or Monasca. We are
100% focused on a notification/event management and not metrics
(CPU=80%). Monasca would be a better comparison in that case.

But, StackTach is not great. It takes some real care and feeding to run at
scale. Particularly with the workers. StackTach has no provisions for
horizontal scaling. And there are no provisions for long term
archiving. We do it, but it's fragile.

So, about a year ago, we started working on StackTach version 3 (STv3)
to address these problems [2]. We're currently rolling this out within
Rax. We're still in the "driving a car with square wheels" phase, but
it's getting better. We're horizontally scalable. We have Ansible
deploy scripts. We support long term archiving to Swift, and soon to
HDFS. We're highly componentized so you can pick and choose the pieces
you want to use (as Monasca is doing, wrapping many of our libraries
to fit their model). And we should be able to support most
notification types ... not just Nova and Glance and not just
OpenStack. We're aiming to make this a broad solution.

Hopefully we'll be able to show more at the Ops meetup :)

That said, I'd love to hear about headaches and failures of the older
StackTach release and how people are using it, or hope to use it.

Cheers! 
-S

PS> I'm behind on my screencast series. Hopefully I'll get them updated once
get past pre-prod. :)

[1] https://github.com/stackforge?query=stacktach
[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmyM48VxCGaW5pPdyFNWCuwVT1bCBV5p3


>________________________________________
>From: Tim Bell [Tim.Bell at cern.ch]
>Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2015 11:47 AM
>To: Daniele Venzano; openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org
>Subject: Re: [Openstack-operators] [Ceilometer] Real world experience   with    Ceilometer deployments - Feedback requested
>
>Does anyone have any proposals regarding
>
>> - Possible replacements for Ceilometer that you have used instead
>
>It seems that many sites have written their own systems. The stacktach/monasca teams are due to demo to the operators meetup in Philadelphia  in March.
>
>Does anyone have experience to share comparing ceilometer with stacktach ?
>
>Tim