OSprofiler in Kolla

Overview

OSProfiler provides a tiny but powerful library that is used by most (soon to be all) OpenStack projects and their corresponding python clients as well as the Openstack client. It provides functionality to generate 1 trace per request, that goes through all involved services. This trace can then be extracted and used to build a tree of calls which can be quite handy for a variety of reasons (for example in isolating cross-project performance issues).

Configuration on Kolla deployment

Enable OSprofiler in /etc/kolla/globals.yml

enable_osprofiler: "yes"
enable_elasticsearch: "yes"

Verify operation

Retrieve osprofiler_secret key present at /etc/kolla/passwords.yml.

Profiler UUIDs can be created executing OpenStack clients (Nova, Glance, Cinder, Heat, Keystone) with --profile option or using the official Openstack client with --os-profile. In example to get the OSprofiler trace UUID for openstack server create.

$ openstack --os-profile <OSPROFILER_SECRET> \
  server create \
  --image cirros \
  --flavor m1.tiny \
  --key-name mykey \
  --nic net-id=${NETWORK_ID} \
  demo

The previous command will output the command to retrieve OSprofiler trace.

$ osprofiler trace show --html <TRACE_ID> --connection-string \
  elasticsearch://<api_interface_address>:9200

For more information about how OSprofiler works, see OSProfiler – Cross-project profiling library.