Overview

The InfluxDB-Grafana Fuel Plugin is used to install and configure InfluxDB and Grafana which collectively provide access to the OpenStack metrics analytics. InfluxDB is a powerful distributed time-series database to store and search metrics time-series. The metrics analytics are used to visualize the time-series and the annotations produced by the LMA Collector. The annotations contain insightful information about the detected fault or anomaly that triggered a change of state for a node cluster or service cluster as well as textual hints about what might be the root cause of the fault or anomaly.

The InfluxDB-Grafana Plugin is an indispensable tool to answering the questions “what has changed in my OpenStack environment, when and why?”. Grafana is installed with a collection of predefined dashboards for each of the OpenStack services that are monitored. Among those dashboards, the Main Dashboard provides a single pane of glass overview of your OpenStack environment status.

InfluxDB and Grafana are key components of the LMA Toolchain project as shown in the figure below.

Requirements

Requirement	Version/Comment
Disk space	The plugin’s specification requires to provision at least 15GB of disk space for the system, 10GB for the logs and 30GB for the database. The installation of the plugin will fail if there is less than 55GB of disk space available on the node.
Mirantis OpenStack	8.0
Hardware configuration	The hardware configuration (RAM, CPU, disk(s)) required by this plugin depends on the size of your cloud environment and other factors like the retention policy. An average setup would require a quad-core server with 8 GB of RAM and access to a 500-1000 IOPS disk. Please check the InfluxDB Hardware Sizing Guide for additional sizing information. It is also highly recommended to use a dedicated disk for your data storage. Otherwise, The InfluxDB-Grafana Plugin will use the root filesystem by default.

Limitations

Currently, the size of an InfluxDB cluster the Fuel plugin can deploy is limited to three nodes. In addition to this, each node of the InfluxDB cluster is configured to run under the meta node role and the data node role. Therefore, it is not possible using the Fuel plugin, to separate the nodes participating in the Raft consensus cluster from the nodes accessing the data replicas.

Key terms, acronyms and abbreviations

Terms & acronyms	Definition
LMA Collector	Logging, Monitoring and Alerting (LMA) Collector. A service running on each node which collects all the logs and the OpenStack notifications.
InfluxDB	InfluxDB is a time-series, metrics, and analytics open-source database (MIT license). It’s written in Go and has no external dependencies. InfluxDB is targeted at use cases for DevOps, metrics, sensor data, and real-time analytics.
Grafana	Grafana is an (Apache 2.0 Licensed) general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It’s focused on providing rich ways to visualize metrics time-series, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB and also supports other data sources via plugins. Grafana is most commonly used for infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring and metric analytics.