SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring Arrives Near Solar Eclipse

Last week saw the first total solar eclipse visible across the United States in 99 years. Being briefly plunged into darkness caused a huge amount of excitement and news coverage.

But being kept in the dark rarely results in such positive emotions.  For example, being unaware of what’s going on under the covers o your private cloud platform is a recipe for stress and anxiety.  Not knowing about underlying issues or dealing with them promptly could severely impact your business.

Fortunately,  a new option for monitoring SUSE OpenStack Cloud was made available in the same week as the solar eclipse, SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring.

SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring leverages the OpenStack Monasca project to provide OpenStack monitoring as a service for SUSE OpenStack deployments. Key capabilities are monitoring and log management. There are graphical tools included for log analysis(Kibana) and  visualizing monitoring data(Grafana) as well as the community plug-ins for the OpenStack Horizon dashboard.

Cloud Monitoring provides pre-configured metrics and dashboards to jump start your monitoring deployment.  These can be used as a good starting point for building your  own monitoring dashboards.  Pre-configured monitoring metrics include OpenStack component health monitoring, information on system resources(CPU, memory, disk) and network usage.

One of the key functions in the Monasca OpenStack project is the ability to create complex alerts and alarms based on logs and metrics gathered by the telemetry services within OpenStack.  These alerts can be sent as emails or can trigger automation or can be sent to services like PagerDuty.

The SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring packages are included in the base SUSE OpenStack Cloud 7 distribution with the maintenance release which was made available in August of 2017. So when you update your OpenStack Cloud 7 installation all the needed packages for Cloud Monitoring will be available. There is a new installation barclamp that comes with the maintenance update to install the OpenStack Cloud Monitoring product. This will allow you to try out Cloud Monitoring for SUSE OpenStack Cloud.

Note – A separate subscription is required for support of SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring in addition to the subscription for SUSE OpenStack Cloud.

Please join us in Prague for SUSECON, 25-29 September 2017 in Prague to learn more about SUSE OpenStack Cloud Monitoring. Below is the  link to the documentation as well. https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-openstack-cloud-7/