telemetry-specs/specs/kilo/http-dispatcher.rst

Http Dispatcher Spec

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ceilometer/+spec/http-dispatcher

Ceilometer dispatcher framework allows various dispatchers to be developed and configured to make ceilometer meter destination to be fully configurable. Currently there are two dispatchers available for Ceilometer, these two dispatchers are used to save Ceilometer meters either to database or log like files. In some applications, meters or filtered meters are wanted to be sent to other third party systems especially using http protocol. This spec provides the specification for a Ceilometer dispatcher using http protocol.

Problem description

The usecase is as follows: Enterprise Monitoring system QRadar needs to capture activities happening in OpenStack keystone such as user creation, deletion, log in etc. Keystone posts these activities onto OpenStack message queues, Ceilometer collector ultimately collects these messages and turn them into meters, so these meters will be sent over to QRadar via the http post request, once the meters get posted via http post request to QRadar, QRadar will analyze the meters and take actions accordingly.

Proposed change

A new dispatcher should be added in Ceilometer/dispatcher package, the dispatcher will be named HttpDispatcher by inheriting the dispatcher.Base class and implement the record_metering_data method along some dispatcher specific configuration parameters. The record_metering_data method will wrap meters in JSON format and post the data by using HTTP POST method to a target. The http request content type should be application/json. If the post target is not defined, then an error should be logged. The post request should use a configurable time to determine if the connection should be timed out. The implementation file should be named http.py so that the module naming pattern consistency is kept. If the meter data contains auditing information (CADF), then the auditing message will be sent rather than the meter itself since most of the information in the meter will be duplicate of the auditing information.

Alternatives

• develop an agent and read data from database, but the impact will be data get saved in the database, but the goal is to have the meter info saved in the system which integrates with Ceilometer.
• develop an agent read data from queue, but there will be a lot more code needed to do that.

Data model impact

None

REST API impact

None

Security impact

None

Pipeline impact

None

Other end user impact

None

Performance/Scalability Impacts

None

Other deployer impact

None

Developer impact

None

Implementation

Assignee(s)

Tong Li (IBM)

Primary assignee:

litong01

Other contributors:

None

Ongoing maintainer:

Tong Li

Work Items

• Http dispatcher
• Document on how to configure this dispatcher
• test cases

Future lifecycle

None

Dependencies

No new dependencies required. It only requires requests, oslo.config which have been the common dependencies of this project.

Testing

Tempest tests will be added in ceilometer/tests/dispatcher/test_http.py. These test cases can be invoked at the gate or locally in a dev environment.

Documentation Impact

file at /doc/source/install/manual.rst will be changed to reflect this new dispatcher along other existing dispatchers. Since this is a new dispatcher, there will not be changes to any existing components, only additional information will be added to the doc on how to enable and configure this dispatcher.

References

None