Open Stack

Hey y'all!

At the summit we had a session about unifying the various ways we record
important events within OpenStack (Nova specifically).

Currently we have the following approaches:
1. The event notification system,
2. The InstanceFault DB table,
3. The ServerAction DB table
4. Exception handling decorators,
5. and, to a lesser extent, logging

With five different ways of doing things not all important events are
being reported to all channels.

We did come up with a plan-of-attack. Specifically:

1. Drop InstanceFault and roll it into ServerAction
2. Change any logging messages greater than DEBUG (like INFO and ERROR)
into Notifications.
3. Default the Logging Notification Driver to ON, so we don't lose any
existing functionality. Users can opt to enable the AMQP driver in order
to expose these notifications to external systems.

The etherpad is here: https://etherpad.openstack.org/unified-notifications

Also, by using the notification mechanism we have a route into things
like Structured Logging (via json) vs the unstructured strings we have
today. There is also a routing notification driver which permits you to
only send certain messages to other notification drivers.

Debug messages would continue to be used as they are today.

Before we start down this road I just wanted to get a taste of the
sentiment out there.

Thanks!
-S