57 lines
2.4 KiB
ReStructuredText
57 lines
2.4 KiB
ReStructuredText
========
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Overview
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========
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Objectives
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==========
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The Ceilometer project was started in 2012 with one simple goal in mind: to
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provide an infrastructure to collect any information needed regarding
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OpenStack projects. It was designed so that rating engines could use this
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single source to transform events into billable items which we
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label as "metering".
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As the project started to come to life, collecting an
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`increasing number of meters`_ across multiple projects, the OpenStack
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community started to realize that a secondary goal could be added to
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Ceilometer: become a standard way to collect meter, regardless of the
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purpose of the collection. For example, Ceilometer can now publish information
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for monitoring, debugging and graphing tools in addition or in parallel to the
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metering backend. We labelled this effort as "multi-publisher".
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.. _increasing number of meters: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ceilometer/measurements.html
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Most recently, as the Heat project started to come to
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life, it soon became clear that the OpenStack project needed a tool to watch
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for variations in key values in order to trigger various reactions.
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As Ceilometer already had the tooling to collect vast quantities of data, it
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seemed logical to add this as an extension of the Ceilometer project, which we
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tagged as "alarming".
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Metering
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========
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If you divide a billing process into a 3 step process, as is commonly done in
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the telco industry, the steps are:
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1. :term:`Metering`
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2. :term:`Rating`
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3. :term:`Billing`
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Ceilometer's initial goal was, and still is, strictly limited to step
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one. This is a choice made from the beginning not to go into rating or billing,
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as the variety of possibilities seemed too large for the project to ever
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deliver a solution that would fit everyone's needs, from private to public
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clouds. This means that if you are looking at this project to solve your
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billing needs, this is the right way to go, but certainly not the end of the
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road for you. Once Ceilometer is in place on your OpenStack deployment, you
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will still have several things to do before you can produce a bill for your
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customers. One of you first task could be: finding the right queries within the
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Ceilometer API to extract the information you need for your very own rating
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engine.
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.. seealso::
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* http://wiki.openstack.org/EfficientMetering/ArchitectureProposalV1
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* http://wiki.openstack.org/EfficientMetering#Architecture
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