A little more than 3 months after our latest minor release, here is the new major version of Gnocchi, stamped 2.0.0. It contains a lot of new and exciting features, and I'd like to talk about some of them to celebrate! You may notice that this release happens in the middle of the OpenStack release cycle. Indeed, Gnocchi does not follow that 6-months cycle, and we release whenever our code is ready. That forces us to have a more iterative approach, less disruptive for other projects and allow us to achieve a higher velocity. Applying the good old mantra release early, release often. Documentation This version features a large documentation update. Gnocchi is still the only OpenStack server project that implements a "no doc, no merge" policy, meaning any code must come with the documentation addition or change included in the patch. The full documentation is included in the source code and available online at gnocchi.xyz. Data split & compression I've already covered this change extensively in my last blog about timeseries compression. Long story short, Gnocchi now splits timeseries archives in small chunks that are compressed, increasing speed and decreasing data size. Measures batching support Gnocchi now supports batching, which allow submitting several measures for different metric in a single request. This is especially useful in the context where your application tends to cache metrics for a while and is able to send them in a batch. Usage is fully documented for the REST API. Group by support in aggregation One of the most demanded features was the ability to do measure aggregation no resource, using a group by type query. This is now possible using the new groupby parameter to aggregation queries. Ceph backend optimization We improved the Ceph back-end a lot. Mehdi Abaakouk wrote a new Python binding for Ceph, called Cradox, that is going to replace the current Python rados module in the subsequent Ceph releases. Gnocchi makes usage of this new module to speed things up, making the Ceph based driver really, really faster than before. We also implemented asynchronous data deletion, which improves performance a bit. The next step will be to run some new benchmarks like I did a few months ago and compare with the Gnocchi 1.3 series. Stay tuned!

We've been hard working with the Gnocchi team these last months to store your metrics, and I guess it's time to show off a bit. So far Gnocchi offers scalable metric storage and resource indexation, especially for OpenStack cloud but not only, we're generic. It's cool to store metrics, but it can be even better to have a way to visualize them! Prototyping We very soon started to build a little HTML interface. Being REST-friendly guys, we enabled it on the same endpoints that were being used to retrieve information and measures about metric, sending back text/html instead of application/json if you were requesting those pages from a Web browser. But let's face it: we are back-end developers, we suck at any kind front-end development. CSS, HTML, JavaScript? Bwah! So what we built was a starting point, hoping some magical Web developer would jump in and finish the job. Obviously it never happened. Ok, so what's out there? It turns out there are back-end agnostic solutions out there, and we decided to pick Grafana. Grafana is a complete graphing dashboard solution that can be plugged on top of any back-end. It already supports timeseries databases such as Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. That was largely enough for that my fellow developer Mehdi Abaakouk to jump in and start writing a Gnocchi plugin for Grafana! Consequently, there is now a basic but solid and working back-end for Grafana that lies in the grafana-plugins repository. With that plugin, you can graph anything that is stored in Gnocchi, from raw metrics to metrics tied to resources. You can use templating, but no annotation yet. The back-end supports Gnocchi with or without Keystone involved, and any type of authentication (basic auth or Keystone token). So yes, it even works if you're not running Gnocchi with the rest of OpenStack. It also supports advanced queries, so you can search for resources based on some criterion and graphs their metrics. I want to try it! If you want to deploy it, all you need to do is to install Grafana and its plugins, and create a new datasource pointing to Gnocchi. It is that simple. There's some CORS middleware configuration involved if you're planning on using Keystone authentication, but it's pretty straightforward just set the cors.allowed_origin option to the URL of your Grafana dashboard. We added support of Grafana directly in Gnocchi devstack plugin. If you're running DevStack you can follow the instructions which are basically adding the line enable_service gnocchi-grafana. Moving to Grafana core Mehdi just opened a pull request a few days ago to merge the plugin into Grafana core. It's actually one of the most unit-tested plugin in Grafana so far, so it should be on a good path to be merged in the future and have support of Gnocchi directly into Grafana without any plugin involved.

Last week was the OpenStack Design Summit in Atlanta, GA where we, developers, discussed and designed the new OpenStack release (Juno) coming up. I've been there mainly to discuss Ceilometer upcoming developments. The summit has been great. It was my third OpenStack design summit, and the first one not being a PTL, meaning it was a largely more relaxed summit for me! On Monday, we started by a 2.5 hours meeting with Ceilometer core developers and contributors about the Gnocchi experimental project that I've started a few weeks ago. It was a great and productive afternoon, and allowed me to introduce and cover this topic extensively, something that would not have been possible in the allocated session we had later in the week. Ceilometer had his design sessions running mainly during Wednesday. We noted a lot of things and commented during the sessions in our Etherpads instances. Here is a short summary of the sessions I've attended. Scaling the central agent I was in charge of the first session, and introduced the work that was done so far in the scaling of the central agent. Six months ago, during the Havana summit, I proposed to scale the central agent by distributing the tasks among several node, using a library to handle the group membership aspect of it. That led to the creation of the tooz library that we worked on at eNovance during the last 6 months. Now that we have this foundation available, Cyril Roelandt started to replace the Ceilometer alarming job repartition code by Taskflow and Tooz. Starting with the central agent is simpler and will be a first proof of concept to be used by the central agent then. We plan to get this merged for Juno. For the central agent, the same work needs to be done, but since it's a bit more complicated, it will be done after the alarming evaluators are converted. Test strategy The next session discussed the test strategy and how we could improve Ceilometer unit and functional testing. There is a lot in this area to be done, and this is going to be one of the main focus of the team in the upcoming weeks. Having Tempest tests run was a goal for Havana, and even if we made a lot of progress, we're still no there yet. Complex queries and per-user/project data collection This session, led by Ildik V ncsa, was about adding finer-grained configuration into the pipeline configuration to allow per-user and per-project data retrieval. This was not really controversial, though how to implement this exactly is still to be discussed, but the idea was well received. The other part of the session was about adding more in the complex queries feature provided by the v2 API. Rethinking Ceilometer as a Time-Series-as-a-Service This was my main session, the reason we met on Monday for a few hours, and one of the most promising session I hope of the week. It appears that the way Ceilometer designed its API and storage backends a long time ago is now a problem to scale the data storage. Also, the events API we introduced in the last release partially overlaps some of the functionality provided by the samples API that causes us scaling troubles. Therefore, I've started to rethink the Ceilometer API by building it as a time series read/write service, letting the audit part of our previous sample API to the event subsystem. After a few researches and experiments, I've designed a new project called Gnocchi, which provides exactly that functionality in a hopefully scalable way. Gnocchi is split in two parts: a time series API and its driver, and a resource indexing API with its own driver. Having two distinct driver sets allows it to use different technologies to store each data type in the best storage engine possible. The canonical driver for time series handling is based on Pandas and Swift. The canonical resource indexer driver is based on SQLAlchemy. The idea and project was well received and looked pretty exciting to most people. Our hope is to design a version 3 of the Ceilometer API around Gnocchi at some point during the Juno cycle, and have it ready as some sort of preview for the final release. Revisiting the Ceilometer data model This session led by Alexei Kornienko, kind of echoed the previous session, as it clearly also tried to address the Ceilometer scalability issue, but in a different way. Anyway, the SQL driver limitations have been discussed and Mehdi Abaakouk implemented some of the suggestions during the week, so we should very soon see more performances in Ceilometer with the current default storage driver. Ceilometer devops session We organized this session to get feedbacks from the devops community about deploying Ceilometer. It was very interesting, and the list of things we could improve is long, and I think will help us to drive our future efforts. SNMP inspectors This session, led by Lianhao Lu, discussed various details of the future of SNMP support in Ceilometer. Alarm and logs improvements This mixed session, led by Nejc Saje and Gordon Chung, was about possible improvements on the alarm evaluation system provided by Ceilometer, and making logging in Ceilometer more effective. Both half-sessions were interesting and led to several ideas on how to improve both systems. Conclusion Considering the current QA problems with Ceilometer, Eoghan Glynn, the new Project Technical Leader for Ceilometer, clearly indicated that this will be the main focus of the release cycle. Personally, I will be focused on working on Gnocchi, and will likely be joined by others in the next weeks. Our idea is to develop a complete solution with a high velocity in the next weeks, and then works on its integration with Ceilometer itself.

OpenStack upstream was released today. Thanks to the release team and a big up to TTX for his work. By the time you read this, probably all of my uploads have reached your local Debian mirror. Please try Havana using either Sid from any Debian mirror, or using the Wheezy backports available here: deb http://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main
deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main Yes, you will need *both* repositories. This is unofficial, though these are the exact same packages as in Sid, just rebuilt for Wheezy. On the package side, here s what is new: - All packages who needs it can now be configured through debconf for the RabbitMQ settings. This is on top of what was already available for Grizzly, which is automated configuration for: keystone auth token, the database, the API endpoints and much more. (remember: this is fully optional, you can always use the non-interactive mode ) - All Quantum pluggin packages have been removed, and now everything is self-contained in the neutron-common package. The selection of which plugin to use is done directly using the core_plugin= directive in /etc/neutron/neutron.conf. This will also control the init.d script of neutron-server, so that it loads the corresponding ini file in /etc/neutron/plugins. The plugin selection is done through Debconf, so that users don t have to write the full path of the plugin class, which is (for most) very cryptic (am I the only one who thinks that writing neutron.plugins.openvswitch.ovs_neutron_plugin.OVSNeutronPluginV2 in a configuration file is user friendly?). - All of the package descriptions and Debconf templates have been reviewed by the Debian internationalization team, and most strings are translated in Czech, Danish, French, Italian, Japanese and Russian (sometimes even more) for almost all packages (thanks everyone!). I d like to publicly thanks eNovance for sponsoring my packaging work, and Mehdi Abaakouk for his work on our CI with the tempest tests. Happy Havana release testing,
Please report bugs through the Debian BTS.

Last week, the second milestone of the Havana developement branch of Ceilometer has been released and is now available for testing and download. This means the first half of the OpenStack Havana development has passed! New features Ten blueprints have been implemented as you can see on the release page. I'm going to talk through some of them here, that are the most interesting for users. The Ceilometer API now returns all the samples sorted by timestamp. This blueprint is the first one implemented by Terri Yu, our OPW intern! In the same spirit, I've added the ability to limit the number of samples returned. On the alarming front, things evolved a lot. I've implemented the notifier system that will be used to run actions when alarms are triggered. To trigger these alarms, Eoghan Glynn (RedHat) worked on the alarm evaluation system that will use the Ceilometer API to check for alarm states. I've reworked the publisher system so it now uses URL formatted target for publication. That now allows to publish different meters to different target using the same publishing protocol (e.g. via UDP toward different hosts). Sandy Walsh (RackSpace) have been working on the StackTach like functionality and added the ability for the collector to optionally store the notification events received. Finally, Mehdi Abaakouk (eNovance) implemented a TTL system for the database, so you're now able to expire your data whenever you like. Bug fixes Thirty-five bugs were fixed, though most of them might not interest you so I won't elaborate too much on that. Go read the list if you are curious. Toward Havana 3 We now have 30 blueprints targeting the Ceilometer's third Havana milestone, with some of them are already started.I'll try to make sure we'll get there without too much trouble for the 6th September 2013. Stay tuned!

Yesterday, the first milestone of the Havana developement branch of Ceilometer has been released and is now available for testing and download. This means the first quarter of the OpenStack Havana development has passed! New features Ten blueprints have been implemented as you can see on the release page. I'm going to talk through some of them here, that are the most interesting for users. Ceilometer can now counts the scheduling attempt of instances done by nova-scheduler. This can be useful to eventually bill such information or for audit (implemented by me for eNovance). People using the HBase backend can now do requests filtering on any of the counter fields, something we call metadata queries, and which was missing for this backend driver. Thanks to Shengjie Min (Dell) for the implementation. Counters can now be sent over UDP instead of the Oslo RPC mechanism (AMQP based by default). This allows counter transmission to be done in a much faster way, though less reliable. The primary use case being not audit or billing, but the alarming features that we are working on (implemented by me for eNovance). The initial alarm API has been designed and implemented, thanks to Mehdi Abaakouk (eNovance) and Angus Salkled (RedHat) who tackled this. We're now able to do CRUD actions on these. Posting of meters via the HTTP API is now possible. This is now another conduct that can be used to publish and collector meter. Thanks to Angus Salkled (RedHat) for implementing this. I've been working on an somewhat experimental notifier driver for Oslo notification that publishes Ceilometer counters instead of the standard notification, using the Ceilometer pipeline setup. Sandy Walsh (Rackspace) has put in place the base needed to store raw notifications (events), with the final goal of bringing more functionnalities around these into Ceilometer. Obviously, all of this blueprint and bugfixes wouldn't be implemented or fixed without the harden eyes of our entire team, reviewing code and advising restlessly the developers. Thanks to them! Bug fixes Thirty-one bugs were fixed, though most of them might not interest you so I won't elaborate too much on that. Go read the list if you are curious. Toward Havana 2 We now have 21 blueprints targetting the Ceilometer's second Havana milestone, with some of them are already started. I'll try to make sure we'll get there without too much trouble for the 18th July 2013. Stay tuned!