System architecture¶

The Telemetry module uses an agent-based architecture. Several modules combine their responsibilities to collect data, store samples in a database, or provide an API service for handling incoming requests.

The Telemetry module is built from the following agents and services:

ceilometer-api

Presents aggregated metering data to consumers (such as billing engines, analytics tools and so forth).

ceilometer-polling

Polls for different kinds of meter data by using the polling plug-ins (pollsters) registered in different namespaces. It provides a single polling interface across different namespaces.

ceilometer-agent-central

Polls the public RESTful APIs of other OpenStack services such as Compute service and Image service, in order to keep tabs on resource existence, by using the polling plug-ins (pollsters) registered in the central polling namespace.

ceilometer-agent-compute

Polls the local hypervisor or libvirt daemon to acquire performance data for the local instances, messages and emits the data as AMQP messages, by using the polling plug-ins (pollsters) registered in the compute polling namespace.

ceilometer-agent-ipmi

Polls the local node with IPMI support, in order to acquire IPMI sensor data and Intel Node Manager data, by using the polling plug-ins (pollsters) registered in the IPMI polling namespace.

ceilometer-agent-notification

Consumes AMQP messages from other OpenStack services.

ceilometer-collector

Consumes AMQP notifications from the agents, then dispatches these data to the appropriate data store.

ceilometer-alarm-evaluator

Determines when alarms fire due to the associated statistic trend crossing a threshold over a sliding time window.

ceilometer-alarm-notifier

Initiates alarm actions, for example calling out to a webhook with a description of the alarm state transition.

Note

The ceilometer-polling service is available since the Kilo release. It is intended to replace ceilometer-agent-central, ceilometer-agent-compute, and ceilometer-agent-ipmi.

Besides the ceilometer-agent-compute and the ceilometer-agent-ipmi services, all the other services are placed on one or more controller nodes.

The Telemetry architecture highly depends on the AMQP service both for consuming notifications coming from OpenStack services and internal communication.