openstack-manuals/doc/admin-guide-cloud/source/telemetry-alarms.rst

Alarms

Alarms provide user-oriented Monitoring-as-a-Service for resources running on OpenStack. This type of monitoring ensures you can automatically scale in or out a group of instances through the Orchestration service, but you can also use alarms for general-purpose awareness of your cloud resources' health.

These alarms follow a tri-state model:

ok

The rule governing the alarm has been evaluated as False.

alarm

The rule governing the alarm have been evaluated as True.

insufficient data

There are not enough datapoints available in the evaluation periods to meaningfully determine the alarm state.

Alarm definitions

The definition of an alarm provides the rules that govern when a state transition should occur, and the actions to be taken thereon. The nature of these rules depend on the alarm type.

Threshold rule alarms

For conventional threshold-oriented alarms, state transitions are governed by:

• A static threshold value with a comparison operator such as greater than or less than.
• A statistic selection to aggregate the data.
• A sliding time window to indicate how far back into the recent past you want to look.

Combination rule alarms

The Telemetry service also supports the concept of a meta-alarm, which aggregates over the current state of a set of underlying basic alarms combined via a logical operator (AND or OR).

Alarm dimensioning

A key associated concept is the notion of dimensioning which defines the set of matching meters that feed into an alarm evaluation. Recall that meters are per-resource-instance, so in the simplest case an alarm might be defined over a particular meter applied to all resources visible to a particular user. More useful however would be the option to explicitly select which specific resources you are interested in alarming on.

At one extreme you might have narrowly dimensioned alarms where this selection would have only a single target (identified by resource ID). At the other extreme, you could have widely dimensioned alarms where this selection identifies many resources over which the statistic is aggregated. For example all instances booted from a particular image or all instances with matching user metadata (the latter is how the Orchestration service identifies autoscaling groups).

Alarm evaluation

Alarms are evaluated by the alarm-evaluator service on a periodic basis, defaulting to once every minute.

Alarm actions

Any state transition of individual alarm (to ok, alarm, or insufficient data) may have one or more actions associated with it. These actions effectively send a signal to a consumer that the state transition has occurred, and provide some additional context. This includes the new and previous states, with some reason data describing the disposition with respect to the threshold, the number of datapoints involved and most recent of these. State transitions are detected by the alarm-evaluator, whereas the alarm-notifier effects the actual notification action.

Webhooks

These are the de facto notification type used by Telemetry alarming and simply involve an HTTP POST request being sent to an endpoint, with a request body containing a description of the state transition encoded as a JSON fragment.

Log actions

These are a lightweight alternative to webhooks, whereby the state transition is simply logged by the alarm-notifier, and are intended primarily for testing purposes.

Workload partitioning

The alarm evaluation process uses the same mechanism for workload partitioning as the central and compute agents. The Tooz library provides the coordination within the groups of service instances. For further information about this approach, see the section called Support for HA deployment of the central and compute agent services <ha-deploy-services>.

To use this workload partitioning solution set the evaluation_service option to default. For more information, see the alarm section in the OpenStack Configuration Reference.

Using alarms

Alarm creation

An example of creating a threshold-oriented alarm, based on an upper bound on the CPU utilization for a particular instance:

$ ceilometer alarm-threshold-create --name cpu_hi \
  --description 'instance running hot' \
  --meter-name cpu_util --threshold 70.0 \
  --comparison-operator gt --statistic avg \
  --period 600 --evaluation-periods 3 \
  --alarm-action 'log://' \
  --query resource_id=INSTANCE_ID

This creates an alarm that will fire when the average CPU utilization for an individual instance exceeds 70% for three consecutive 10 minute periods. The notification in this case is simply a log message, though it could alternatively be a webhook URL.

Note

Alarm names must be unique for the alarms associated with an individual project. The cloud administrator can limit the maximum resulting actions for three different states, and the ability for a normal user to create log:// and test:// notifiers is disabled. This prevents unintentional consumption of disk and memory resources by the Telemetry service.

The sliding time window over which the alarm is evaluated is 30 minutes in this example. This window is not clamped to wall-clock time boundaries, rather it's anchored on the current time for each evaluation cycle, and continually creeps forward as each evaluation cycle rolls around (by default, this occurs every minute).

The period length is set to 600s in this case to reflect the out-of-the-box default cadence for collection of the associated meter. This period matching illustrates an important general principal to keep in mind for alarms:

Note

The alarm period should be a whole number multiple (1 or more) of the interval configured in the pipeline corresponding to the target meter.

Otherwise the alarm will tend to flit in and out of the insufficient data state due to the mismatch between the actual frequency of datapoints in the metering store and the statistics queries used to compare against the alarm threshold. If a shorter alarm period is needed, then the corresponding interval should be adjusted in the pipeline.yaml file.

Other notable alarm attributes that may be set on creation, or via a subsequent update, include:

state

The initial alarm state (defaults to insufficient data).

description

A free-text description of the alarm (defaults to a synopsis of the alarm rule).

enabled

True if evaluation and actioning is to be enabled for this alarm (defaults to True).

repeat-actions

True if actions should be repeatedly notified while the alarm remains in the target state (defaults to False).

ok-action

An action to invoke when the alarm state transitions to ok.

insufficient-data-action

An action to invoke when the alarm state transitions to insufficient data.

time-constraint

Used to restrict evaluation of the alarm to certain times of the day or days of the week (expressed as cron expression with an optional timezone).

An example of creating a combination alarm, based on the combined state of two underlying alarms:

$ ceilometer alarm-combination-create --name meta \
  --alarm_ids ALARM_ID1 \
  --alarm_ids ALARM_ID2 \
  --operator or \
  --alarm-action 'http://example.org/notify'

This creates an alarm that will fire when either one of two underlying alarms transition into the alarm state. The notification in this case is a webhook call. Any number of underlying alarms can be combined in this way, using either and or or.

Alarm retrieval

You can display all your alarms via (some attributes are omitted for brevity):

$ ceilometer alarm-list
+----------+--------+-------------------+---------------------------------+
| Alarm ID | Name   | State             | Alarm condition                 |
+----------+--------+-------------------+---------------------------------+
| ALARM_ID | cpu_hi | insufficient data | cpu_util > 70.0 during 3 x 600s |
+----------+--------+-------------------+---------------------------------+

In this case, the state is reported as insufficient data which could indicate that:

• meters have not yet been gathered about this instance over the evaluation window into the recent past (for example a brand-new instance)
• or, that the identified instance is not visible to the user/tenant owning the alarm
• or, simply that an alarm evaluation cycle hasn't kicked off since the alarm was created (by default, alarms are evaluated once per minute).

Note

The visibility of alarms depends on the role and project associated with the user issuing the query:

• admin users see all alarms, regardless of the owner
• on-admin users see only the alarms associated with their project (as per the normal tenant segregation in OpenStack)

Alarm update

Once the state of the alarm has settled down, we might decide that we set that bar too low with 70%, in which case the threshold (or most any other alarm attribute) can be updated thusly:

$ ceilometer alarm-update --threshold 75 ALARM_ID

The change will take effect from the next evaluation cycle, which by default occurs every minute.

Most alarm attributes can be changed in this way, but there is also a convenient short-cut for getting and setting the alarm state:

$ ceilometer alarm-state-get ALARM_ID
$ ceilometer alarm-state-set --state ok -a ALARM_ID

Over time the state of the alarm may change often, especially if the threshold is chosen to be close to the trending value of the statistic. You can follow the history of an alarm over its lifecycle via the audit API:

$ ceilometer alarm-history ALARM_ID
+------------------+-----------+---------------------------------------+
| Type             | Timestamp | Detail                                |
+------------------+-----------+---------------------------------------+
| creation         | time0     | name: cpu_hi                          |
|                  |           | description: instance running hot     |
|                  |           | type: threshold                       |
|                  |           | rule: cpu_util > 70.0 during 3 x 600s |
| state transition | time1     | state: ok                             |
| rule change      | time2     | rule: cpu_util > 75.0 during 3 x 600s |
+------------------+-----------+---------------------------------------+

Alarm deletion

An alarm that is no longer required can be disabled so that it is no longer actively evaluated:

$ ceilometer alarm-update --enabled False -a ALARM_ID

or even deleted permanently (an irreversible step):

$ ceilometer alarm-delete ALARM_ID

Note

By default, alarm history is retained for deleted alarms.