What does the Zenoss ZenPack for OpenStack Do?
By: John Boyle >> The OpenStack ZenPack provides granular level monitoring capabilities for popular components, such as Ceph and Cinder Storage, Nova Compute services, and Neutron networking connectivity. These components represent some of the most highly utilized projects in the OpenStack Community according to user survey released in April 2016, which showed an incredible 97% adoption rate for Nova and equally impressive 90% adoption rate for Neutron.
Zenoss also released a new ZenPack specifically for Ceph, Red Hat’s software-defined block device and object gateway storage platform. The new ZenPack allows users to leverage either the SSH or Calamari API to quickly set up complete monitoring for a Ceph cluster. Additionally, the new ZenPack integrates with both the existing OpenStack and Linux ZenPacks from Zenoss to detail linkages between components and their integrated LVMs (logical volumes) and Ceph RBD (block devices) volumes.
Why is it impactful to my business and IT infrastructure?
The OpenStack ZenPack provides insights into the overall status and health of a deployment, and provides actionable data for dozens of the most highly utilized elements of an OpenStack cloud.
“One of the more telling quotes I heard at the OpenStack Summit in April was how frequently
companies building OpenStack clouds overlook monitoring.” said Marcus MacNeill, Vice
President of Product Management at Zenoss. “With a cloud provider, infrastructure monitoring typically happens behind the scenes. You receive an alert telling you your VM is down, but the underlying systems that support it are something that the provider looks after for you. However, when you build your own cloud, you’re now responsible for the infrastructure and, more importantly, the services it supports.”
“The best advice I can give a company building an OpenStack cloud is to find a tool that’s going to monitor every single aspect of your OpenStack deployment; from the hardware up through the network, and all of the components that make up your services”, added MacNeill.
Watch Zenoss Present End-To-End Monitoring at OpenStack Summit 2016.
What are the key capabilities of the OpenStack ZenPack?
• Tenants – Including breakouts and usage for Instances, Networks, Subnets, Routers, Ports, Floating IPS, and more.
• Nova Services – Providing monitoring of state, performance, and utilization.
• Neutron Networking – Supplying detailed connectivity metrics for Nova compute services.
• Cinder (Block-Level) Storage – Including metrics on API Endpoints, Volumes, Snapshots, Volume Types, and Quotas.
Zenoss plans to continue innovating for the OpenStack ecosystem with future releases focusing on integrating Keystone, which is used to provide authentication and authorization for other services, as well as Glance, which provides image storage for virtual machines.
What is a ZenPack Anyway?
Zenoss Service Dynamics is an Open Source monitoring platform that can be extended through plug-ins, called ZenPacks, that allow you to monitor a vast array of devices, applications, and systems under a single unified dashboard. ZenPacks are to Zenoss Service Dynamics as Plug-ins are to WordPress.
ZenPacks give developers the freedom to develop monitoring solutions that extend their Zenoss managed services platform. Developers and Zenoss create and publish enterprise ready ZenPacks in a very flexible environment to support dynamic IT infrastructures.
Zenoss and ZenPacks are based on open source that enables developers to solve any monitoring challenges on a granular level.
How do I get the OpenStack ZenPack
This latest ZenPack is available for Zenoss Service Dynamics customers with an active subscription.
Learn more about Zenoss products and solutions and schedule a demo at https://www.zenoss.com
Join and engage with the Zenoss Community at http://www.zenoss.org
