Enable the Observability plugin for central logging, monitoring and alerting

1. Overview

Duration: 3 minutes

Before you get started!

Welcome to OpenStack!

In this series of tutorials, we will walk you through all the necessary steps to install, configure and get started with OpenStack. Using just three dedicated machines, you will learn how to deploy OpenStack in highly available, multi-node, production-grade clusters.

This tutorial is the fifth in the “Phase II - Deploying OpenStack” series.

Explore other tutorials >

What is OpenStack?

OpenStack is a collection of open source projects designed to work together to form the basis of a cloud. OpenStack can be used for both private and public cloud implementation.

What is Sunbeam?

Sunbeam is an upstream project under the governance of the OpenInfra Foundation (OIF), which was created to lower the barrier to entry for OpenStack, simplify its adoption process, and set the foundation for an autonomous private cloud. Sunbeam uses cloud-native architecture and total bottom-up automation to make OpenStack more accessible to newcomers and to help users get to grips with the platform immediately.

What is MicroStack?

MicroStack (based on Sunbeam) is an OpenStack distribution designed for small-scale cloud environments. While it is available with full commercial support from Canonical, it can also be self-deployed with no friction, effectively eliminating the need for a paid consulting engagement. MicroStack currently includes core OpenStack services only, but is expected to evolve quickly to ensure full feature parity with Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack soon.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

Enable the Observability plugin
Use the Canonical Observability Stack (COS) to monitor your OpenStack cloud

You will only need:

Theoretical knowledge of OpenStack gained by completing all tutorials in the “Phase I - Learning OpenStack” series
Three fresh physical machines with:
The latest Ubuntu LTS installed
A minimum of 32 GB of free memory
200 GB of SSD storage available on the root disk
At least one un-partitioned disk of at least 200 GiB in size
Two network interfaces
- Primary: for access to the OpenStack control plane
- Secondary: for remote access to cloud VMs
OpenStack cloud bootstrapped and configured
Additional nodes added to the cluster

2. Enable the Observability plugin

Duration: 5 minutes

Before moving the cloud to production, the Observability plugin should be enabled for logging, tracing, monitoring and alerting purposes. This plugin deploys COS, a stack consisting of the most popular open source observability tools, including Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, etc.

In order to enable the Observability plugin, execute the following command:


$ sunbeam enable observability

Once finished, you should be able to see the following message:


OpenStack telemetry application enabled.
Observability enabled.

3. Use COS to monitor your OpenStack cloud

Duration: 5 minutes

In order to obtain the Grafana dashboard URL, execute the following command:


$ sunbeam observability dashboard-url

Sample output:


http://172.16.1.205/observability-grafana

In order to obtain the Grafana admin user password, execute the following command:


$ juju run --model observability grafana/leader get-admin-password

Sample output:


Running operation 3 with 1 task
  - task 4 on unit-grafana-0

Waiting for task 4...
admin-password: OsmPSCYjGT9e
url: http://172.16.1.205/observability-grafana

You can now find the admin user password under the admin-password key in the output above.

Now, visit the Grafana dashboard URL, type the obtained credentials and press the Log in button:

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