EfficientMetering
Efficient Metering in OpenStack Blueprint
Project and code : https://launchpad.net/ceilometer
Meetings : http://wiki.openstack.org/Meetings/MeteringAgenda
Uses cases
- need a tool to collect per customer usage
- need an API to query collected data from existing billing system
- data needed per customer, with an hour level granularity, includes:
- Compute - Nova:
- instances (type, availability zone) - hourly usage
- cpu - hourly usage
- ram - hourly usage
- nova volume block device (type, availability zone) - hourly usage
- reserved
- used
- network (data in/out, availability zone) - hourly bytes + total bytes
- differentiate between internal and external end-points
- External floating IP - hourly bytes + total bytes
- Compute - Nova:
- Storage - Swift
- total data stored
- data in/out - hourly bytes + total bytes
- differentiate between internal and external end-points
^l
Proposed design
Counters
The following is a first list of counters that needs to be collected in order to allow billing systems to perform their tasks. This list must be expandable over time and each administrator must have the possibility to enable or disable each counter based on his local needs.
Counter name | Component | Resource ID | Volume unit | Secondary | Note | |
c1 | instance | nova compute | instance id | minute | type | type is the instance flavor id used |
c2 | cpu | nova compute | instance id | minute | type | Arm|x86|x86_64]) |
c3 | ram | nova compute | instance id | Megabyte | ||
c4 | disk | nova compute | instance id | Megabyte | system disks persist when the instance is shutdown but not terminated and must be accounted for | |
c5 | io | nova compute | instance id | Megabyte | disk IO in megabyte per second has a high impact on the service availability and could be billed separately | |
v1 | bd_reserved | nova volume | volume id | Megabyte | ||
v2 | bd_used | nova volume | volume id | Megabyte | (optional) | |
n1 | net_in_int | nova network | IP address | Kbytes | volume of data received from internal network source | |
n2 | net_in_ext | nova network | IP address | Kbytes | volume of data received from external network source | |
n3 | net_out_int | nova network | IP address | Kbytes | volume of data sent to internal network dest | |
n4 | net_out_ext | nova network | IP address | Kbytes | volume of data sent to external network destinations | |
n5 | net_float | nova network | IP address | minute | type | number of floating ips assigned (reserved and/or allocated to the account). The type distinguishes public IPs depending on their allocation policy. For instance IPv6 or IPv4_FROM_RIPE or IPv4_FROM_OVH etc. The acquisition or maintainance cost of a floating IP may depend on its allocation policy. |
o1 | obj_volume | swift | swift account id | Megabytes | total object volume stored | |
o2 | obj_in_int | swift | swift account id | Kbytes | volume of data received from internal network source | |
o3 | obj_in_ext | swift | swift account id | Kbytes | volume of data received from external network source | |
o4 | obj_out_int | swift | swift account id | Kbytes | volume of data sent to internal network dest | |
o5 | obj_out_ext | swift | swift account id | Kbytes | volume of data sent to external network destinations | |
o6 | obj_number | swift | swift account id | container | Number of objects stored for a container | |
o7 | obj_containers | swift | swift account id | Number of containers | ||
o8 | obj_requests | swift | swift account id | type | Number of HTTP requests, type being the request type (GET/HEAD/PUT/POST…) |
Other possible counters:
- service handlers (load balancer, databases, queues...)
- service usage
Note for network counters (n1-n4): the distinction between internal and external traffic requires that internal networks be explicitly listed in the agent configuration.
Note(dhellmann): That isn't going to scale to a real system where tenants may create their own networks. We should just collect the data for each network, and let the billing system decide on the rate at which to charge (possibly $0 for internal networks).
Storage
Field name | Type |
source | ? |
user_id | String |
project_id | String |
resource_id | String |
counter_type | String |
counter_volume | Number |
counter_duration | Integer |
counter_datetime | Timestamp |
payload | String |
message_signature | String |
message_id |
- Data is stored on a per account basis in a db on a per availability zone basis
- Per account records hold
- account_id (same as keystone’s)
- account_state (enabled, credit disabled, admin disabled)
- db is not directly accessible by any other mean than API
- a process must collect messages from agent and store data
- a process may validate counters against nova event database
- a process may verify that messages were not lost
- a process may verify that accounts states are in sync with keystone
Note(harlowja): Using a DB might not be the best idea, scale-wise, why not just write to plain-text files then process it to something useful using something like hadoop and map-reduce? For large amounts of data thats what those systems are for. The verification, validation, almost seem like they are better in some other system, just get as much data as possible to start?
Alternative gauge design
During the Folsom ODS session, an alternate design was discussed where events instead of recoding deltas, would record the absolute value of a gauge. That would require to extend the event to include the 'object id' (instance, network, volume) associated with the counter.
The delta model can be derived from the absolute model, and means it's resilient in the face of missing delta registration.
Agents
- Agent on each nova compute node to accumulate and send counters for c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, n1, n2, n3, n4. The agent is likely to be pulling this information from libvirt.
- c5 could get disk I/O stats with libvirt's virDomainBlockStats
- n3 / n4 could use iptables accounting rules ? (for external traffic ?)
- n1 / n2 could use libvirt's virDomainInterfaceStats ? (for all traffic ?)
- Agent on each nova volume node to accumulate and send counters for v1, v2
- Agent on each swift proxy to forward existing accounting data o1 and accumulate and send o2-o5
Note: nova network node need not accumulate and send counters for n5 because they can be pulled directly from the nova database ( see nova-manage floating list for instance )
Architecture
- An agent runs on each OpenStack node ( Bare Metal machine ) and harvests the data localy
- A storage daemon communicates with the agents to collect their data and aggregate them
- The agents collecting data are authenticated to avoid pollution of the metering service
- The data is sent from agents to the storage daemon via a trusted messaging system (RabbitMQ?)
- The message queue is separate from other queues (such as the nova queue)
- The messages in queue are signed and non repudiable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-repudiation)
Note: document some use case scenarios to really nail down the architecture. Who signals the metering service? The API service or nova, quantum, swift, glance, volume?
Messaging use cases
Instance creation
- An instance is created, nova issues a message ( http://wiki.openstack.org/SystemUsageData )
- The metering storage agent listens on the nova queue and picks up the creation message
- The metering storage agent stores the creation event locally, with a timestamp
- The metering storage daemon is notified by the agent that the instance has been created five minutes ago and aggregates this information in the tenant records
API
- Database can only be queried via a REST API (i.e. the database schema is not a supported API and can change in a non backward compatible way from one version to the other).
- Requests must be authenticated (separate from keystone, or only linked to accounting type account)
- API Server must be able to be redundant
- Requests allow to
- GET account_id list
- GET list of counter_type
- GET list of events per account
- optional start and end for counter_datetime
- optional counter_type
- GET sum of (counter_volume, counter_duration) for counter_type and account_id
- optional start and end for counter_datetime
Note: the aggregation of values is done by the API and is not stored in the database. It may be cached for performance reasons but the caching strategy is outside of the scope of this blueprint.
Note: At the Folsom design session, the SET account_id call designed to change the status of the tenant in keystone was pointed more as a wart at this stage, since the billing system will need to talk to Keystone API anyway to make sense of the account id.
Free Software Billing Systems
A list of the billing system implementations that could use the Metering system when it becomes available.
- Dough https://github.com/lzyeval/dough
- trystack.org billing https://github.com/trystack/dash_billing
- nova-billing https://github.com/griddynamics/nova-billing
Related resources
- Definition of a Storage Accounting Record http://www.ogf.org/Public_Comment_Docs/Documents/2012-02/EMI-StAR-OGF-info-doc-v2.pdf
- UsageRecord format http://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.98.pdf
- Capturing exchanges https://github.com/rackspace/stacktach
- Messages about system usage http://wiki.openstack.org/SystemUsageData
- http://etherpad.openstack.org/EfficientMetering
- Use https://github.com/stackforge
- lzyeval codebase:
- billing https://github.com/lzyeval/dough
- metering https://github.com/lzyeval/kanyun
- trystack.org codebase:
- http://wiki.openstack.org/utilizationdata
- Nova billing https://github.com/griddynamics/nova-billing
- Swift
- Retrieve Account Metadata http://docs.openstack.org/bexar/openstack-object-storage/developer/content/ch03s01.html#d5e388
- swift middlewares examples :
- April 2012 mailing list thread on billing https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg10334.html
- Virgo (scriptable agent for counter collection): https://github.com/racker/virgo
- Contact Brandon Philips at Rackspace - brandon.philips@rackspace.com
- Ovirt DWH http://www.ovirt.org/wiki/Ovirt_DWH and associated database schema http://gerrit.ovirt.org/gitweb?p=ovirt-dwh.git;a=blob;f=data-warehouse/historydbscripts_postgres/create_tables.sql;h=2e05299a2de1b79634e862e5f1811dda3f303a96;hb=0271e5205ad29109c2e2313e7f6fb900e76a757a#l377
- Swift http://folsomdesignsummit2012.sched.org/event/d9135eabdd775432c74c3f1d32a325d3 and http://etherpad.openstack.org/FolsomSwiftStatsd
- Collecting meters from libvirt https://github.com/ss7pro/rescnt
FAQ
Q: why reinvent the wheel ? XXXX already does it.
A: please mail about the tool you think does the work, unless it is listed below.
- http://wiki.openstack.org/SystemUsageData for instance is specific to nova while the metering aims at aggregating all OpenStack components
- collectd, munin etc. all have pieces of the puzzle but do not have all of them and they are not designed with billing in mind and are not a good fit for this blueprint