OpenStack monitoring: Zabbix Ceilometer proxy installation

Recently a Ceilometer proxy for Zabbix was released by OneSource. This proxy will pull all the instance information from OpenStack and populate it in Zabbix

The source code can be downloaded from here:

https://github.com/OneSourceConsult/ZabbixCeilometer-Proxy

The basic prerequisites for the server where the proxy is running is Python and Pika library. Also there should be network connectivity from the proxy machine to your OpenStack installation.

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Agentless openstack monitoring using zabbix

Zabbix can be a tough cookie to crack!! And if you are planning to monitor Openstack using Zabbix, there is lot of additional work to be done .More so, if you want to go the agentless way, ie using SNMP

So, here we go.I am using Ubuntu 12.04 OS, both for my Zabbix server as well as openstack nodes

• First you need to install the following packages using apt-get in the machine being monitored ie the openstack node

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Tech tip: Increase openstack project quota from command line

1. List the keystone tenants and search for the required tenant

keystone tenant-list |grep <tenantname>

 Note the id of the tenant being displayed. You need to use this id in the next command

2. Get quota details of the tenant using the following command

nova-manage project quota <tenantid>

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Instances goes to paused state in Openstack Havanna

Issue: 

All instances in openstack will be in paused node. You will not be able to create new instances or switch on any of the paused instances

Reason: 

Most often the reason will be lack of disk space in your compute node. By default the instances are created in the /var/lib/nova/instances folder of the compute node. This location is defined by the parameter "instances_path" in nova.conf of the  compute node. If your "/" partition is running out of disk space, then you cannot perform any instance related operations

Solution: 

• Change the "instances_path" location to a different location. Ideally you could attach an additional disk and mount it to a directory and update the directory path in the "instance_path" variable.
   
• Problem arises when you already have a number of instances  in the previous folder. You should move them over to the new location.

•  Also you should set the group and ownership of the new instances folder to "nova" user, so that the permissions, ownership and group memberships are same as that of the previous folder

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Openstack havanna neutron agent-list alive status error

In some scenarios, the openstack neutron-agent status will show as xxx even though you could see he neutron agents services are up and running in the network and compute nodes. Also you could see a fluctuation in the agent status if you try the agent-list command repeatedly.  Confusing, right?

Actually  the problem is not in the actual agent status, but with two default configurations in neutron.conf ie agent_down_time and report_interval. It is the interval during which neutron will check the agent status. There is a bug reported against this issue

https://bugs.launchpad.net/neutron/+bug/1293083

As per the details in the bug " report_interval" is how often an agent sends out a heartbeat to the service. The Neutron service responds to these 'report_state' RPC messages by updating the agent's heartbeat DB record. The last heartbeat is then compared to the configured agent_down_time to determine if the agent is up or down"

The neutron agent-list command uses the agent_down_time value to display the status. The default values are set very low, because of which the alive status is shown as down/fluctuating.

Solution: As suggested in the solution for the bug, update the values of agent_down_time and report_interval to 75 and 30 seconds respectively. Since the above mentioned rpc issue with open-vswitch agent in compute is  resolved by this, all the agents will be shown as alive

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