Vitrage - Getting Started Guide

This document explains how to get started using Vitrage. Here you will find easy-to-follow instructions on how to install & configure Vitrage to suit your needs, try out its different functions, and expand it’s capabilities.

Before you start

Nagios Installation & Configuration

Nagios is a widely-used tool for monitoring hardware and software systems. It periodically runs tests on the entities it monitors, and sets the state of these tests to OK (pass) or different levels of severity.

Vitrage comes with Nagios as a datasource, The examples given below use Nagios as the trigger for deduced alarms, states and RCA templates in Vitrage.

Vitrage in action

In order to see Vitrage in action, you should place your templates under /etc/vitrage/templates. See template example.

In the example shown here, we will cause Nagios to report high memory usage on the devstack host. As a result and as defined in our sample template, Vitrage will change the state of the hosted instances to “suboptimal”, raise an alarm on each and indicate that the host-level alarm is the cause for the instance alarms.

Setting up

  • Deploy several (3-5) instances on your devstack. Make sure that they are in state “Running” before continuing.

  • In your browser, go to the Nagios site you defined. If you used the steps defined above:

    • URL: http://<IP>:54321/my_site/omd/

    • Select “Classic Nagios GUI” (other views are ok as well, the instructions below on raising alarms are for this view). If you do not see “Classic Nagios GUI”, please do as following:

      su - my_site
omd config
# Change GUI to Nagios
# Restart my_site
omd restart

    • User/Password: omdadmin/omd

  • Set the “Memory Used” test to “Warning”:

    • Click on Services –> Memory Used
    • On the right pane, select “Submit passive check result for this service”
    • For the “Check result” enter “Warning”
    • For “Check Output” enter “High memory usage”. Click commit, then Done.
    • On the right pane, select “Stop accepting passive checks for this service” and then Done.

With the alarm on the host now activated, lets see how this is expressed in Vitrage.

Deduced State

  • In the Horizon UI, select Vitrage –> Topology

  • The UI will now show the Sunburst view of the compute hierarchy. The color of each resource reflects its state: green (ok), yellow (warning), red (critical).

    A list of alarms will appear in the UI, showing an alarm on the host, as well as one alarm per instance.

Deduced Alarm

  • In the Horizon UI, select Vitrage –> Alarms
  • A list of alarms will appear in the UI, showing an alarm on the host, as well as one alarm per instance.

Root Cause Analysis

  • In the Horizon UI, select Vitrage –> Alarms
  • Select a host alarm, and click on the RCA icon in the far right-hand side of the screen. This will show how the host alarm caused the instance alarms

Advanced Usage

Modify states & severities

Since each data-source might represent a resource state or alarm severity differently, for each data-source you can define it’s own mapping to the normalized states/severities supported in Vitrage. This will impact UI and templates behavior that depends on these fields.

Writing your own templates

For more information regarding Vitrage templates, their format and how to add them, see here.