+@openstack-discuss, ML was accidentally dropped from Mohammed's reply

On Thu, 23 May 2019 20:45:13 +0800, Mohammed Naser mnaser@vexxhost.com wrote:

On Thu, May 23, 2019, 10:00 AM melanie witt <melwittt@gmail.com mailto:melwittt@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey all,

I'm looking for feedback around whether we can improve how we show
server status in server list and server show when the compute host it
resides on is down.

When a compute host goes down while a server on it was previously
running, the server status continues to show as ACTIVE in a server
list.
This is because the power state and status is adjusted by a periodic
task run by nova-compute, so if nova-compute is down, it cannot update
those states.

So, for an end user, when they do a server list, they see their server
as ACTIVE when it's actually powered off.

We have another field called 'host_status' available since API
microversion 2.16 [1] which is controlled by policy and defaults to
admin, which is capable of showing the server status as UNKNOWN if the
field is specified, for example:

nova list --fields
id,name,status,task_state,power_state,networks,host_status

This is cool, but it is only available to admin by default, and it
requires that the end user adds the field to their CLI command in the
--fields option.

Question: do people think we should make the server status field
reflect
UNKNOWN as well, if the 'host_status' is UNKNOWN? And if so, should it
be controlled by policy or no?

I'm in support of this. I also agree on the fact it should be controlled by policy however not to get too ahead of my self:

• I think it should ideally be defaulted to true

• ideally this should be an API level policy and not compute level

  Normally, we do not expose compute host details to non-admin in the API by default, but I noticed recently that our "down cells" support will show server status as UNKNOWN if a server is in a down cell [2]. So I wondered if it would be considered OK to show UNKNOWN if a host is down we well, without defaulting it to admin-only.

  I would really appreciate if people could share their opinion here and if consensus is in support, I will move forward with proposing a change accordingly.

  Cheers, -melanie

Thank you for proposing this

[1]
https://docs.openstack.org/nova/latest/reference/api-microversion-history.html#id14
[2]
https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/66a77f2fb75bbb9daebdca1cad0255ecafe41e92/nova/api/openstack/compute/views/servers.py#L108