ceilometer-publisher-http

HTTP Publisher for Ceilometer.

Problem Description

We needed to reliably receive certain types of events from Ceilometer (Juno) for Enterprise auditing. Examples of auditing events we were interested in included:

• compute.instance.create.end
• compute.instance.exists
• compute.instance.power_off.end
• compute.instance.delete.end
• compute.instance.reboot.end
• compute.instance.shutdown.end
• compute.instance.update

We would like to have leveraged the HTTP dispatcher but this is only available since Kilo and we had to support Juno. The HTTP Dispatcher also supports forwarding CADF audit events only.

In order to support Juno, we decided to write a HTTP publisher to write samples to our collector via HTTP POST requests. This gave us the flexibility to also persist the samples in the Ceilometer database for access via the Ceilometer API.

Data Flow

1. Openstack produces a JSON message blob
2. Enters the Ceilometer pipeline via a ceilometer agent
3. ceilometer-publisher-http sends the JSON to a collector via a HTTP POST request.

Thanks

The following projects provided excellent guidance.

• https://github.com/anchor/ceilometer-publisher-zeromq/
• http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/ceilometer-specs/specs/kilo/http-dispatcher.html

Configuration

• target - URI where samples should be sent
• verify_ssl - Verify SSL certificates for HTTPS requests. Default True.
• secret - Value assigned to X-Ceilometer-Secret request header.
• timeout - The max time in seconds to wait for a request to complete. Defaults to 5.

Installation & Deployment

• Install from source

  Example commands:

  git clone source_location ceilometer-publisher-http
  cd ceilometer-publisher-http
  python setup.py install
  

• Add http:// to the publishers in your pipeline.yaml. (This is by default in /etc/ceilometer/)

  Example pipeline.yaml:

  sources:
      - name: instance_source
        interval: 60
        meters:
            - "instance:*"
        sinks:
            - instance_sink
  sinks:
      - name: instance_sink
        transformers:
        publishers:
            - notifier://
            - http://
  

• Add configuration details for the publisher to ceilometer.conf (This also in /etc/ceilometer/ by default).

  Partial example ceilometer.conf:

  [publisher_http]
  target = https://localhost:4430/sample
  verify_ssl = True
  secret = yaddascmaddayadda
  timeout = 5
  

• Restart the central and notification ceilometer agents (ceilometer-acentral + ceilometer-anotification)

License

(c) 2014 Fidelity Investments Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0