Nagios OpenStack Installer – Automated monitoring of your OpenStack VMs

There are many tools available which can be used to monitor operation of the Opentack infrastructure, but as OpenStack user you might not be interested in monitoring OpenStack itself. Your primary interest should be the operation of the VMs that are hosted on OpenStack. Nagios OpenStack Installer is a tool for exactly that purpose: it uses a Nagios VM inside the OpenStack environment and configures it to monitor all VMs that you own.

Nagios OpenStack Installer configures your OpenStack monitoring environment remotely from your desktop PC or labtop. In order to use Nagios OpenStack Installer you need to fulfil the following prerequisites.

• You must have an SSH Key for securely accessing the Nagios VM and the VMs you own and you must know the SSH credentials to access the VMs.
• You must know your OpenStack user account (name and id), your OpenStack password, the OpenStack Keystone authentication URL and the OpenStack tenant (“project”) (name and id) you work with.
• You must be able to create a VM that serves as Nagios VM and you must own a publicly available IP (“floating IP”) to make the Nagios dashboard accessible to the outside world.
• Nagios OpenStack Installer is a Python tool and requires some Python packages. Make sure to install Python 2.7 on your desktop. Additionally you need the following packages:
  • pip: The package manager to install Python packages from the PyPI repository (Windows users should refer to the pip developer’s “get pip” manual to install pip, Cygwin users are recommended to follow these guidelines in atbrox blog).
  • fabric: This package is used to access OpenStack VMs via SSH and remotely execute tasks on the VMs.
  • python-keystoneclient: To access the OpenStack Keystone API and authenticate to your OpenStack environment.
  • python-novaclient: To manage VMs which are hosted on OpenStack.
  • cuisine: This is a configuration management tool and lightweight alternative to configuration managers like Puppet or Chef. cuisine is required to manage the packages and configuration files on the Nagios VM and the monitored VMs.
  • pickle: pickle is a object serialization tool that can store objects and their current state in a file dump. Object serilaization is used to get the list of VMs which should be monitored.
  • We recommend to use pip for installation of the required packages, since pip automatically installs package dependencies.
• You must have Git downloaded and installed.

After having installed the prerequisites on your local PC or labtop, you can use Nagios OpenStack Installer by performing the following steps.

1. Create a new directory and clone the Nagios OpenStack Installer Github repository in it.git clone https://github.com/icclab/kobe6661-nagios-openstack-installer.git
2. Edit the credentials in install_autoconfig.py, remote.py, remote_server_config.py and vm_list_extractor.py to match your OpenStack and SSH credentials.
3. Run remote_server_config.py from Python console. This installs and configures Nagios server on your Nagios VM. After installation you should be able to access the Nagios Dashboard by pointing your webbrowser to “http://<your_nagios_public_ip>/nagios” and providing your Nagios login credentials.
4. Run vm_list_extractor.py from Python console. This will extract the list of VMs on OpenStack that should be monitored and save the list as pickle file dump on your computer.
5. Run install_autoconfig.py from Python console. This will upload the Python scripts required to automatically update the Nagios configuration in case of changes in the OpenStack VM environment (nagios_config_updater.py, config_transporter.py, config_generator.py, vm_list_extractor.py). Additionally it will run these Python scripts on the Nagios VM to let Nagios capture the VMs which should be monitored, install and run the required Nagios and NRPE plugins on these VMs and reconfigure and restart Nagios server to monitor these VMs remotely.

Now the Nagios environment is installed and you should be able to monitor your VMs. Nagios OpenStack Installer is available on ICCLab’s Github repository. Feel free to try it out and give feedback about future improvements.