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Re: [ceilometer] Potential New Use Cases

 

Yes, I see a general need to be able to represent meta data the identifies associations between monitored systems and between usage stored in the datastore. There could be a variety of ways that we need to relate event data, so the mechanism should be relatively generic. In addition to your use case, we would want to be able to map instances to other tenants, group VM's together to represent some kind of shared identity or behavior, map instances to some kind of special service type. I think there are big advantages to keeping the collection and storage of this data separate:
1. It does not require Nova to be aware of the details of the VM internals.
2.It allows for deferral of processing until later in the rating process, which helps on scalability 3. makes it easier to extract and report on this data for other use cases besides the base billing 4. it more extensible in the sense that you can add arbitrary metadata without affecting the core usage data generation.

We use this information as part of our rating process to determine the correct charges to apply, so we will need to be able to query for it.

Dan

On 11/5/2012 5:04 AM, Doug Hellmann wrote:


On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Dan Dyer <dan.dyer00@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:dan.dyer00@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

    Yes, I am assuming the service controller provides a different
    stream of data from the lower level VM events. So the question is
    how to represent and store this additional meta data in
    ceilometer. Note that there doesn't necessarily need to be a
    linkage/grouping between the resources since the association is
    what is actually contained in the metadata that is provided by the
    service controller.

    As a summary
    Nova provides its normal events for usage
    Service controller provides a mapping of nova instances to service
    type and actual end user


So the problem isn't necessarily that you want to measure something different, but that the "ownership" in the existing data is not "correct" from the perspective of the billing system.

We have a similar issue at DreamHost. Our existing user database has account ids that need to be mapped to tenant ids from keystone. Rather than putting that information in keystone, or ceilometer, we decided to store it in our system and have the DreamHost billing system drive the ceilometer API. Does it make sense to do something similar here?

If we definitely want ceilometer to hold the metadata, then I could also see adding an API to let an outside system add metadata to a resource. That would let the PaaS code, which knows about each VM, store extra data that would be returned with the VM metadata when a caller visits /resources/<resourceid>.

Would you expect to be able to query using the metadata? For example, "provide the total instance hours for all instances with paas_tag=foo"?

Doug



    Dan


    On 11/1/2012 11:25 AM, Doug Hellmann wrote:


    On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Dan Dyer <dan.dyer00@xxxxxxxxx
    <mailto:dan.dyer00@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

        In some cases, the service controller is actually running
        inside a VM. It would not have access to the internals of the
        VM's. It maintains its metadata separately from the Nova
        infrastructure.


    It doesn't need internal access to the VM, but something has to
    share the metadata with ceilometer (or "join" it to the data
    ceilometer has) at some point. If it would be too difficult to
    get the data into the events, then it could be done by the app
    that uses the ceilometer API to query for usage. For example, the
    app that loads data from ceilometer to your real billing system
    could be driven by data saved by the service controller in
    whatever database it uses.

    Doug



        DD


        On 10/25/2012 2:25 AM, Nick Barcet wrote:
        Let's imagine that the service that launch instances can tag the
        instance with:
        a) a common service identifier (constant)
        b) a uuid unique for each "Unit" of the service
        such as <constant>:<uuid>

        If that tag is passed onto the events which ceilometer stores in its
        entirety as meta, I do not see what the difficulty would be for the
        rating engine to be able to reconcile the information to handle your 2
        use cases.  Am I missing something?

        Nick

        On 10/25/2012 12:03 AM, Dan Dyer wrote:
        I don't think its just a matter of adding more meters or events for a
        couple of reasons:
        1. In many cases the metadata I am referring to comes from a different
        source than the base usage data. Nova is still emitting its normal
        events, but we get the service/user mapping from a different source. I
        would not characterize this data as usage metrics but more data about
        the system relationships.
        2. in the multiple VM case, we need to have the relationships specified
        so that we can ignore the proper VM's. There has also been talk of
        hybrid billing models that charge for some part of the VM usage as well
        as other metrics. Once again we need a way to characterize the
        relationships so that processing can associate and filter correctly.

        Dan

        On 10/24/2012 3:35 PM, Julien Danjou wrote:
        On Wed, Oct 24 2012, Dan Dyer wrote:

        Use Case 1
        Service Owned Instances
        There are a set of use cases where a service is acting on behalf of a
        user,
        the service is the owner of the VM but billing needs to be attributed
        to the
        end user of the system.This scenario drives two requirements:
        1. Pricing is similar to base VM's but with a premium. So the type of
        service for a VM needs to be identifiable so that the appropriate
        pricing
        can be applied.
        2. The actual end user of the VM needs to be identified so usage can be
        properly attributed
        I think that for this, you just need to add more meters on top of the
        existing one with your own user and project id information.

        As an example, in some of our PAAS use cases, there is a service
        controller
        running on top of the base VM that maintains the control and and
        manages the
        customer experience. The idea is to expose the service and not have the
        customer have to (or even be able to) manipulate the virtual machine
        directly. So in this case, from a Nova perspective, the PAAS service
        owns
        the VM and it's tenantID is what is reported back in events. The way we
        resolve this is to query the service controller for meta data about that
        instances they own. This is stored off in a separate "table" and used to
        determine the real user at aggregation time.
        This is probably where you should emit the meters you need.

        Use Case 2
        Multple Instances combine to make a billable "product/service"
        In this use case, a service might consist of several VM's, but the
        actual
        number does not directly drive the billing.  An example of this might
        be a
        redundant service that has a primary and two backup VM's that make up a
        deployment. The customer is charged for the service, not the fact
        that there
        are 3 VM's running. Once again, we need meta data that is able to
        describe
        this relationship so that when the billing records are processed, this
        relationship can be identified and billed properly.
        Kind of the same here, if you don't want to really bill the vm, just
        don't meter them (or ignore the meters) and emit your own meter via your
        PaaS platform to bill your customer.

        Or is there a limitation I miss?

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