Pandaman

What is Pandaman?
Pandaman(ITDB service) is designed to provide asset management for infrastructure powered by OpenStack. The ASSET defined here includes both physical assets and virtual assets in the cloud, including hardware, software, relations, geography, people, racks, topologies, applications, etc.

Asset management is very important for data center management and operation. As more and more data centers are powered by OpenStack, these traditional asset management softwares are not satisfied.

1. When operating an OpenStack clouds, operators should simultaneously watch asset management software, which was previously set up in the data center, and watch OpenStack Horizon/Ceilometer. They cannot get a central and global view of both physical and virtual assets.

2. When designing fine-grained scheduling algorithms, no further information from environment can be given because OpenStack doesn't know about them, especially for those geographical information and rack/network architectures. But these important data are definitely existed in the environment.

3. Most of the existing softwares don't provide Restful API. Other applications like OpenStack cannot interact with them.

Use cases
The primary objective of this section is to articulate the primary use cases of Pandaman and how it can be used for OpenStack clouds; it does not necessarily cover every conceivable use case that Pandaman can fulfill.

Links & IRC

 * Project at Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/pandaman
 * Project at Github: https://github.com/openstack/pandaman
 * Weekly IRC meeting is under discussion.
 * IRC channel for regular daily discussions is under discussion.

What are the benefits of Pandaman?
Generally, by carefully constructing a ITDB for infrastructure, the IT organization effectively transcends its legacy as an organization focused on cost reduction into being an engine for leveraging three fundamental IT value dimensions. These are: the management of time, the management of economy, and their effect on overall profitability. IT productively starts its transition to a full partner business service firm and value contributor by adopting the language of the business and its manner of recording results. Building a ITDB with the right focus allows an IT organization to support IT Service Management Best Practices, while simultaneously demonstrating its unique ability to drive advantages that are both market-making and competitor-crushing.