System architecture

System architecture

The Telemetry service uses an agent-based architecture. Several modules combine their responsibilities to collect, normalize, and redirect data to be used for use cases such as metering, monitoring, and alerting.

The Telemetry service is built from the following agents:

ceilometer-api (deprecated in Ocata)
Presents aggregated metering data to consumers (such as billing engines and analytics tools). Alarm, Meter and Event APIs are now handled by aodh, gnocchi, and panko services respectively.
ceilometer-polling
Polls for different kinds of meter data by using the polling plug-ins (pollsters) registered in different namespaces. It provides a single polling interface across different namespaces.

Note

The ceilometer-polling service provides polling support on any namespace but many distributions continue to provide namespace-scoped agents: ceilometer-agent-central, ceilometer-agent-compute, and ceilometer-agent-ipmi.

ceilometer-agent-notification
Consumes AMQP messages from other OpenStack services, normalizes messages, and publishes them to configured targets.
ceilometer-collector (deprecated in Ocata)

Consumes AMQP notifications from the agents, then dispatches these data to the appropriate data store.

Note

  1. The ceilometer-polling service provides polling support on any namespace but many distributions continue to provide namespace-scoped agents: ceilometer-agent-central, ceilometer-agent-compute, and ceilometer-agent-ipmi.
  2. The ceilometer-api and ceilometer-collector are no longer supported since the Ocata release. Storage and API are provided by gnocchi, aodh, and panko services.

Except for the ceilometer-polling agents polling the compute or ipmi namespaces, all the other services are placed on one or more controller nodes.

The Telemetry architecture depends on the AMQP service both for consuming notifications coming from OpenStack services and internal communication.

Supported databases

The other key external component of Telemetry is the database, where events, samples, alarm definitions, and alarms are stored. Each of the data models have their own storage service and each support various back ends.

The list of supported base back ends for measurements:

The list of supported base back ends for alarms:

The list of supported base back ends for events:

Supported hypervisors

The Telemetry service collects information about the virtual machines, which requires close connection to the hypervisor that runs on the compute hosts.

The following is a list of supported hypervisors.

Note

For details about hypervisor support in libvirt please see the Libvirt API support matrix.

Supported networking services

Telemetry is able to retrieve information from external networking services:

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