[Openstack] [metering] high-level design proposal

Matt Joyce matt.joyce at cloudscaling.com
Tue May 22 16:53:23 UTC 2012


My point of concern.
\
If an agent is being built into the compute nodes, that would best be a
split out project.

Two major reasons.  First and foremost sub projects should not be spinning
up their own agents.  Secondly, there is a use case of agents outside of
metering.

If an agent is to be built it is a not insignificant change in architecture
for openstack.

-Matt

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Doug Hellmann
<doug.hellmann at dreamhost.com>wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 4:05 AM, Endre Karlson <endre.karlson at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> If I'm understanding this correctly, the Collector is kind of like a
>> Agent in Qantum (It sits on a machine doing stuff and passing info
>> upstream).
>>
>> If you look at the approach they have now in Quantum Agent it's writing
>> directly to the DB. But looking at the next version they seem to be moving
>> to having the Agent send data upstream to the Plugin in Quantum. Why not do
>> something similar?
>>
>> I mean if you have a MQ cluster in a deployment I think it makes more
>> sense to have 1 thing that handles the db stuff then having each Collector
>> connect to the db..
>>
>
> That was the goal, but I may have swapped the terminology around. For
> ceilometer, the "agent" runs on the compute node and writes only to the
> message queue. The "collector" runs in a central location and writes to the
> database. The number of collectors you need will depend on the number of
> messages being generated, but the architecture supports running several in
> parallel in a way that each instance does not need to be aware of the
> others.
>
> Doug
>
>
>> Endre.
>> 2012/5/22 Nick Barcet <nick.barcet at canonical.com>
>>
>>> On 05/21/2012 10:52 PM, Doug Hellmann wrote:
>>> > I have written up some of my thoughts on a proposed design for
>>> > ceilometer in the wiki [1]. I'm sure there are missing details, but I
>>> > wanted to start getting ideas into writing so they could be discussed
>>> > here on the list, since I've talked about different parts with a couple
>>> > of you separately.
>>> >
>>> > Let me know what you think, and especially if I am not clear or have
>>> > left out any details.
>>> >
>>> > Thanks,
>>> > Doug
>>> >
>>> > [1] http://wiki.openstack.org/EfficientMetering/ArchitectureProposalV1
>>>
>>> Thanks a lot for putting this together Doug.
>>>
>>> A few questions:
>>>
>>> * "The collector runs on one or more central management servers to
>>> monitor the message queues (for notifications and for metering data
>>> coming from the agent). Notification messages are processed and turned
>>> into metering messages and sent back out onto the message bus using the
>>> appropriate topic. Metering messages are written to the data store
>>> without modification."
>>> -> Is the reason behind why collectors do not write directly to the
>>> database a way to allow db less implementations as Francis suggested
>>> earlier?  In this case it may be useful to say it explicitly.
>>>
>>> * "Plugins may require configuration options, so when the plugin is
>>> loaded it is asked to add options to the global flags object, and the
>>> results are made available to the plugin before it is asked to do any
>>> work."
>>> -> I am not sure where the "global flags object" resides and how option
>>> are populated.  I think it would make sense for this to be globally
>>> controlled, and therefore may require for a simple discovery exchange on
>>> the queue to retrieve values and set defaults if it does not exist yet.
>>>
>>> * "Metering messages are signed using the hmac module in Python's
>>> standard library. A shared secret value can be provided in the
>>> ceilometer configuration settings. The messages are signed by feeding
>>> the message key names and values into the signature generator in sorted
>>> order. Non-string values are converted to unicode and then encoded as
>>> UTF-8. The message signature is included in the message for verification
>>> by the collector."
>>> -> The signature is also kept in the database for future audit
>>> processes, maybe worth mentioning it here.
>>> -> In addition to a signature, I think we would need a sequence number
>>> to be embedded by the agent for each message sent, so that loss of
>>> messages, or forgery of messages, can be detected by the collector and
>>> further audit process.
>>>
>>> Thanks again,
>>> Nick
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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