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Vitrage


OpenStack Project Vitrage horizontal.png

What is Vitrage?

Vitrage is the OpenStack RCA (Root Cause Analysis) service for organizing, analyzing and expanding OpenStack alarms & events, yielding insights regarding the root cause of problems and deducing their existence before they are directly detected.

High Level Functionality

  1. Physical-to-Virtual entities mapping
  2. Deduced alarms and states (i.e., raising an alarm or modifying a state based on analysis of the system, instead of direct monitoring)
  3. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for alarms/events
  4. Horizon plugin for the above features




High Level Architecture

Vitrage High Level Architecture


Vitrage Data Source(s). Responsible for importing information from different sources, regarding the state of the system. This includes information regarding resources both physical & virtual, alarms, etc.. The information is then processed into the Vitrage Graph. Currently Vitrage comes ready with data sources for Nova, Cinder, and Aodh OpenStack projects, Nagios alarms, and a static Physical Resources data source.

Vitrage Graph. Holds the information collected by the Data Sources, as well as their inter-relations. Additionally, it implements a collection of basic graph algorithms that are used by the Vitrage Evaluator (e.g., sub-matching, BFS, DFS etc).

Vitrage Evaluator. Coordinates the analysis of (changes to) the Vitrage Graph and processes the results of this analysis. It is responsible for execution different kind of template-based actions in Vitrage, such as to add an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) relationship between alarms, raise a deduced alarm or set a deduced state.

For more information, refer to the low level design

Use Cases

Baseline

Baseline

We consider the following example, where a we are monitoring a Switch (id 1002), for example via Nagios, and as a problem on the Switch causes a Nagios alarm (a.k.a. Nagios test) to be activated. The following image depicts the logical relationship among different resources in the system that are related to this switch, as well as the raised alarm. Note the mapping between virtual (instance) and physical (host, switch) entities, as well as between the alarm and the switch it relates to.









Deduced alarms & states

Deduced Alarm

Problems on the switch can, at times, have a negative impact on the virtual instances running on hosts attached to the switch. We would like to raise an alarm on those instances to indicate this impact, as shown here:

As can be seen, the problem on the switch should trigger an alarm on all instances associated with the switch. Similarly, we might want the state of all these instances to be changed to "ERROR" as well. This functionality should be supported even if we cannot directly monitor the state of the instances. Instances might not be monitored for all aspects of performance, or perhaps the problem in the switch makes monitoring them difficult or even impossible. Instead, we can deduce this problem exists on the instances based on the state of the switch, and raise alarms and change states accordingly.








Root Cause Indicators

Root Cause Link

Furthermore, we would like to be able to track this cause and effect - that the problem in the switch caused the problems experienced at the instances. In the following image, we highlight a single connection between the cause and effect for clarity - but all such links should be supported.

Important Note: not all deduced alarms are caused by the trigger - the trigger might only be an indication of correlation, not causation. In the case we are examining, however, the trigger alarm is also the cause:

Once the local "causes" links (one hop) are detected and registered, we can follow them one hop after another to track the full causal chain of a sequence of events.







Demos and Presentations

Quick Demos (A bit outdated)

Summit Sessions

OpenStack Austin, April 2016

OPNFV Berlin, June 2016

OpenStack Barcelona, October 2016

OpenStack Boston, May 2017

OpenStack Sydney, November 2017

OpenStack Vancouver, May 2018


Development (Blueprints, Roadmap, Design...)

Design Discussions


Communication and Meetings

Meetings

  • Weekly on Wednesday at 0800 UTC in #openstack-meeting-4 at freenode
  • Check Vitrage Meetings for more details

Contact Us

  • IRC channel for regular daily discussions: #openstack-vitrage
  • Use [Vitrage] tag for Vitrage emails on OpenStack Mailing List