Open Stack

Hi to all Vitrage and Congress contributors,

We had a good introduction meeting in Austin and we (Vitrage) think that we can have a good collaboration between the projects.

Vitrage, as an Openstack Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Engine, builds a topology graph of all the entities in the system (physical, virtual and application) from different datasources. It thus can enrich Congress by providing more data about what is happening in the system. Additionally, the Vitrage RCA and deduce alarms & states mechanism can enhance the visibility of faults and how they inter-relate.  By using this information Congress could then execute different policies and perform more accurate actions.

Another good property of Vitrage is that it can receive data also from non-openstack sources, like Nagios, which monitor the physical resources, including Switches (which are not modeled today in OpenStack).

There are many ways in which Congress-Vitrage combination would be helpful. To take just one example: 
a. If a physical Switch is down, Vitrage can raise deduced alarms on the connected hosts and on the virtual machines affected by this change in switch state. 
b. Congress will then be notified by Vitrage about these alarms, which can set off Congress policies of migration. 
c. Furthermore, due to the RCA functionality, Congress will be aware that the Switch error is the source of the problem, and can determine the best place to create new instances of the VMs so that this  switch fault will not impact the new instances.

As you can see, for each fault, we can use Vitrage to link it to other faults, and create alarms to reflect them. This is all done via Vitrage Templates, so the system is configurable to the needs of the user. Thus many more cases such as the example above could be thought of.

To summarize, Vitrage can enrich Congress with the following four features:
a. RCA
b. Deduced alarms
c. Physical, virtual and application layers
d. Graph structure and topology of the system that defines the connections and relationships between all entities on which we can run quick graph algorithms to decide different actions to perform

If you can think of additional use cases that can be used here, please share ☺

For more data about Vitrage and its insights please take a look here:
https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Vitrage

Best Regards,
Alexey Weyl