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Hi all,

Thanks again for the great comments on the initial cut of wireframes. I’ve updated them a fair amount based on feedback in this e-mail thread along with the feedback written up here:
https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/alarm-management-page-design-discussion

Here is a link to the new version:
http://people.redhat.com/~lsurette/OpenStack/Alarm%20Management%20-%202014-06-05.pdf

And a quick explanation of the updates that I made from the last version:

1) Removed severity.

2) Added Status column. I also added details around the fact that users can enable/disable alerts.

3) Updated Alarm creation workflow to include choosing the project and user (optionally for filtering the resource list), choosing resource, and allowing for choose of amount of time to monitor for alarming.
     -Perhaps we could be even more sophisticated for how we let users filter down to find the right resources that they want to monitor for alarms?

4) As for notifying users…I’ve updated the “Alarms” section to be “Alarms History”. The point here is to show any Alarms that have occurred to notify the user. Other notification ideas could be to allow users to get notified of alerts via e-mail (perhaps a user setting?). I’ve added a wireframe for this update in User Settings. Then the Alarms Management section would just be where the user creates, deletes, enables, and disables alarms. Do you still think we don’t need the “alarms” tab? Perhaps this just becomes iteration 2 and is left out for now as you mention in your etherpad.

5) Question about combined alarms…currently I’ve designed it so that a user could create multiple levels in the “Alarm When…” section. They could combine these with AND/ORs. Is this going far enough? Or do we actually need to allow users to combine Alarms that might watch different resources?

6) I updated the Actions column to have the “More” drop down which is consistent with other tables in Horizon.

7) Added in a section in the “Add Alarm” workflow for “Actions after Alarm”. I’m thinking we could have some sort of If State is X, do X type selections, but I’m looking to understand more details about how the backend works for this feature. Eoghan gave examples of logging and potentially scaling out via Heat. Would simple drop downs support these events?

8) I can definitely add in a “scheduling” feature with respect to Alarms. I haven’t added it in yet, but I could see this being very useful in future revisions of this feature.

9) Another though is that we could add in some padding for outlier data as Eoghan mentioned. Perhaps a setting for “This has happened 3 times over the last minute, so now send an alarm.”?  

A new round of feedback is of course welcome :)

Best,
Liz

On Jun 4, 2014, at 1:27 PM, Liz Blanchard <lsurette at redhat.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the excellent feedback on these, guys! I’ll be working on making updates over the next week and will send a fresh link out when done. Anyone else with feedback, please feel free to fire away.
> 
> Best,
> Liz
> On Jun 4, 2014, at 12:33 PM, Eoghan Glynn <eglynn at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Hi Liz,
>> 
>> Two further thoughts occurred to me after hitting send on
>> my previous mail.
>> 
>> First, is the concept of alarm dimensioning; see my RDO Ceilometer
>> getting started guide[1] for an explanation of that notion.
>> 
>> "A key associated concept is the notion of dimensioning which defines the set of matching meters that feed into an alarm evaluation. Recall that meters are per-resource-instance, so in the simplest case an alarm might be defined over a particular meter applied to all resources visible to a particular user. More useful however would the option to explicitly select which specific resources we're interested in alarming on. On one extreme we would have narrowly dimensioned alarms where this selection would have only a single target (identified by resource ID). On the other extreme, we'd have widely dimensioned alarms where this selection identifies many resources over which the statistic is aggregated, for example all instances booted from a particular image or all instances with matching user metadata (the latter is how Heat identifies autoscaling groups)."
>> 
>> We'd have to think about how that concept is captured in the
>> UX for alarm creation/update.
>> 
>> Second, there are a couple of more advanced alarming features 
>> that were added in Icehouse:
>> 
>> 1. The ability to constrain alarms on time ranges, such that they
>>  would only fire say during 9-to-5 on a weekday. This would
>>  allow for example different autoscaling policies to be applied
>>  out-of-hours, when resource usage is likely to be cheaper and
>>  manual remediation less straight-forward.
>> 
>> 2. The ability to exclude low-quality datapoints with anomolously
>>  low sample counts. This allows the leading edge of the trend of
>>  widely dimensioned alarms not to be skewed by eagerly-reporting
>>  outliers.
>> 
>> Perhaps not in a first iteration, but at some point it may make sense
>> to expose these more advanced features in the UI.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Eoghan
>> 
>> [1] http://openstack.redhat.com/CeilometerQuickStart
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> 
>>> Hi Liz,
>>> 
>>> Looks great!
>>> 
>>> Some thoughts on the wireframe doc:
>>> 
>>> * The description of form:
>>> 
>>>   "If CPU Utilization exceeds 80%, send alarm."
>>> 
>>> misses the time-window aspect of the alarm definition.
>>> 
>>> Whereas the boilerplate default descriptions generated by
>>> ceilometer itself:
>>> 
>>>   "cpu_util > 70.0 during 3 x 600s"
>>> 
>>> captures this important info.
>>> 
>>> * The metric names, e.g. "CPU Utilization", are not an exact
>>> match for the meter names used by ceilometer, e.g. "cpu_util".
>>> 
>>> * Non-admin users can create alarms in ceilometer:
>>> 
>>> "This is where admins can come in and
>>>  define and edit any alarms they want
>>>  the environment to use."
>>> 
>>> (though these alarms will only have visibility onto the stats
>>>  that would be accessible to the user on behalf of whom the
>>>  alarm is being evaluated)
>>> 
>>> * There's no concept currently of alarm severity.
>>> 
>>> * "Should users be able to enable/dis-able alarms."
>>> 
>>> Yes, the API allows for disabled (i.e. non-evaluated) alarms.
>>> 
>>> * "Should users be able to own/assign alarms?"
>>> 
>>> Only admin users can create an alarm on behalf of another
>>> user/tenant.
>>> 
>>> * "Should users be able to acknowledge, close alarms?"
>>> 
>>> No, we have no concept of ACKing an alarm.
>>> 
>>> * "Admins can also see a full list of all Alarms that have
>>>  taken place in the past."
>>> 
>>> In ceilometer terminology, we refer to this as alarm history
>>> or alarm change events.
>>> 
>>> * "CPU Utilization exceeded 80%."
>>> 
>>> Again good to capture the duration in that description of the
>>> event.
>>> 
>>> * "Within the Overview section, there should be a new tab that allows the
>>>  user to click and view all Alarms that have occurred in their
>>>  environment."
>>> 
>>> Not sure really what "environment" means here. Non-admin tenants only
>>> have visibility to their own alarm, whereas admins have visibility to
>>> all alarms.
>>> 
>>> * "This list would keep the latest  alarms."
>>> 
>>> Presumably this would be based on querying the alarm-history API,
>>> as opposed to an assumption that Horizon is consuming the actual
>>> alarm notifications?
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Eoghan
>>> 
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> Hi All,
>>>> 
>>>> I’ve recently put together a set of wireframes[1] around Alarm Management
>>>> that would support the following blueprint:
>>>> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/horizon/+spec/ceilometer-alarm-management-page
>>>> 
>>>> If you have a chance it would be great to hear any feedback that folks have
>>>> on this direction moving forward with Alarms.
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> Liz
>>>> 
>>>> [1]
>>>> http://people.redhat.com/~lsurette/OpenStack/Alarm%20Management%20-%202014-05-30.pdf
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> OpenStack-dev mailing list
>>>> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
>>>> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> OpenStack-dev mailing list
>>> OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
>>> http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
>>> 
> 

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