Configuring the Telemetry (ceilometer) service¶

The Telemetry module (ceilometer) performs the following functions:

Efficiently polls metering data related to OpenStack services.

Collects event and metering data by monitoring notifications sent from services.

Publishes collected data to various targets including data stores and message queues.

Note

As of Liberty, the alarming functionality is in a separate component. The metering-alarm containers handle the functionality through aodh services. For configuring these services, see the aodh docs: https://docs.openstack.org/aodh/latest/

Configure a MongoDB backend prior to running the ceilometer playbooks. The connection data is in the user_variables.yml file (see section Configuring the user data below).

Setting up a MongoDB database for ceilometer¶

Install the MongoDB package:

# apt-get install mongodb-server mongodb-clients python-pymongo

Edit the /etc/mongodb.conf file and change the bind_i to the management interface:

bind_ip = 10.0.0.11

Edit the /etc/mongodb.conf file and enable smallfiles:

smallfiles = true

Restart the MongoDB service:

# service mongodb restart

Create the ceilometer database:

# mongo --host controller --eval 'db = db.getSiblingDB("ceilometer"); db.addUser({user: "ceilometer", pwd: "CEILOMETER_DBPASS", roles: [ "readWrite", "dbAdmin" ]})'
This returns:
MongoDB shell version: 2.4.x
connecting to: controller:27017/test
 {
  "user" : "ceilometer",
  "pwd" : "72f25aeee7ad4be52437d7cd3fc60f6f",
  "roles" : [
   "readWrite",
   "dbAdmin"
  ],
  "_id" : ObjectId("5489c22270d7fad1ba631dc3")
 }
Note

Ensure CEILOMETER_DBPASS matches the ceilometer_container_db_password in the /etc/openstack_deploy/user_secrets.yml file. This is how Ansible knows how to configure the connection string within the ceilometer configuration files.

Configuring the hosts¶

Configure ceilometer by specifying the metering-compute_hosts and metering-infra_hosts directives in the /etc/openstack_deploy/conf.d/ceilometer.yml file: ceilometer.yml.example

The metering-compute_hosts host the ceilometer-agent-compute service. It runs on each compute node and polls for resource utilization statistics. The metering-infra_hosts host several services:

A central agent (ceilometer-agent-central): Runs on a central management server to poll for resource utilization statistics for resources not tied to instances or compute nodes. Multiple agents can be started to enable workload partitioning (See HA section below).

A notification agent (ceilometer-agent-notification): Runs on a central management server(s) and consumes messages from the message queue(s) to build event and metering data, then sends it to one or more publishers. Multiple notification agents can be started to enable workload partitioning (See HA section below).

An API server (ceilometer-api): Runs on one or more central management servers to provide data access from the data store.

Configuring the hosts for an HA deployment¶

Ceilometer supports running the polling and notification agents in an HA deployment.

The Tooz library provides the coordination within the groups of service instances. Tooz can be used with several backends. At the time of this writing, the following backends are supported:

Zookeeper: Recommended solution by the Tooz project.

Redis: Recommended solution by the Tooz project.

Memcached: Recommended for testing.

Important

The OpenStack-Ansible project does not deploy these backends. One of the backends must exist before deploying the ceilometer service.

Achieve HA by configuring the proper directives in ceilometer.conf using ceilometer_ceilometer_conf_overrides in the user_variables.yml file. The Ceilometer Admin Guide details the options used in ceilometer.conf for HA deployment. The following is an example of ceilometer_ceilometer_conf_overrides:

ceilometer_ceilometer_conf_overrides:
  coordination:
    backend_url: "zookeeper://172.20.1.110:2181"
  notification:
    workload_partitioning: True

Configuring the user data¶

Specify the following configurations in the /etc/openstack_deploy/user_variables.yml file:

The type of database backend ceilometer uses. Currently only MongoDB is supported: ceilometer_db_type: mongodb

The IP address of the MongoDB host: ceilometer_db_ip: localhost

The port of the MongoDB service: ceilometer_db_port: 27017

To install Ceilometer on an existing OpenStack-Ansible environment, run the os-ceilometer-install.yml playbook.