Back near the dawn of time in December, 2016, Sam Yaple created a
spec
to add Monasca containers to Kolla. Aeons later
Kolla-Ansible
finally supports deploying Monasca out-of-the-box. Much like crossing the
Magic Roundabout
in Swindon, many things had to line up to make it happen. The ground was
paved by adding support for
Apache Kafka,
Zookeeper,
Storm and
Logstash.
Then came the Monasca services, rolled out one-by-one until the
Fluentd
firehose was coupled up to the Monasca Log API. The CI system
creaked, the lights went dim and the core reviewers groaned as Zuul unleashed
a colossal chunk of Ansible. No longer did one have to carefully deploy,
configure and maintain an uncountable number of services. Injurious crashes
were reduced by
three quarters
and sanity returned to the Monasca sysadmins. So what exactly did the end
result look like?
At this stage you might be thinking that
Graphviz
has just exploded on your screen, or even, has anyone keeled over and died
from looking at the diagram? But if you defocus your eyes a little further,
you'll see that there can actually be three, or even more of everything.
Three APIs, three instances of almost anything you can see, with traffic
pirouetting through a Kafka cluster in between. The only things which spoil
the fun are InfluxDB which requires an enterprise license for clustering,
and the Monasca fork of Grafana, which just doesn't seem to play nicely
with load balancing.
So what is it like to run this monster in production? Does it deliver? Why
on Earth would you want to do it? We actually have some compelling reasons
which we'll summarise below:
- Horizontally scalable
- We love working with small deployments, and supporting these matters
greatly to us, but in the world of HPC, machines can get really huge.
Indeed, it's not uncommon for small deployments to morph into large ones,
and with Monasca, no matter where you start, you can seamlessly scale
with demand.
- Multi-tenant
- Add value to your OpenStack deployment. Through the power of automation
it's true that you could stamp out a monitoring and logging solution per
tenant without too much fuss. However, it's hard to beat simply logging
in via a public endpoint with your OpenStack credentials.
- Highly available / fault tolerant
- Kolla Monasca has been designed to provide a single pane of glass for
monitoring the health of your OpenStack deployment. If a wheel falls
off, we don't want you scrambling for the spare tyre. All critical
monitoring and logging services can be deployed in a highly available
and fault tolerant configuration.
- Support for push-metrics
- In big systems there are often complex interactions and understanding
these is part of the art of HPC. What's more, complex interactions don't
tend to happen at fixed time intervals. Support for push-metrics allows
users to stream batches of data into Monasca with a sampling frequency
of whatever they like. So whether you're tuning traffic flows in your
network fabric, or optimising your MPI routine, Monasca has you covered.
So without further ado, we're going to hand you over to the
Kolla documentation.
Unlike the Magic Roundabout you'll have two paths to
follow: The brave can enable Monasca in their existing Kolla Ansible
deployment, and the cautious can choose to
deploy Monasca standalone
and integrate, if they wish, with an external instance of Keystone which
doesn't need to be provided by Kolla. We hope that you like it, and
most of all we hope that you find it useful.