OpenStack and Cortex Integration

Input and output integration overview

This plugin collects metrics from essential OpenStack services, facilitating the monitoring and management of cloud infrastructures.

This plugin enables Telegraf to send metrics to Cortex using the Prometheus remote write protocol, allowing seamless ingestion into Cortex’s scalable, multi-tenant time series storage.

Integration details

OpenStack

The OpenStack plugin allows users to collect performance metrics from various OpenStack services such as CINDER, GLANCE, HEAT, KEYSTONE, NEUTRON, and NOVA. It supports multiple OpenStack APIs to fetch critical metrics related to these services, enabling comprehensive monitoring and management of cloud resources. As organizations increasingly adopt OpenStack for their cloud infrastructure, this plugin plays a vital role in providing insights into resource usage, availability, and performance across the cloud environment. Configuration options allow for customized polling intervals and filtering unwanted tags to optimize performance and cardinals.

Cortex

With Telegraf’s HTTP output plugin and the prometheusremotewrite data format you can send metrics directly to Cortex, a horizontally scalable, long-term storage backend for Prometheus. Cortex supports multi-tenancy and accepts remote write requests using the Prometheus protobuf format. By using Telegraf as the collection agent and Remote Write as the transport mechanism, organizations can extend observability into sources not natively supported by Prometheus—such as Windows hosts, SNMP-enabled devices, or custom application metrics—while leveraging Cortex’s high-availability and long-retention capabilities.

Configuration

OpenStack

[[inputs.openstack]]
  ## The recommended interval to poll is '30m'

  ## The identity endpoint to authenticate against and get the service catalog from.
  authentication_endpoint = "https://my.openstack.cloud:5000"

  ## The domain to authenticate against when using a V3 identity endpoint.
  # domain = "default"

  ## The project to authenticate as.
  # project = "admin"

  ## User authentication credentials. Must have admin rights.
  username = "admin"
  password = "password"

  ## Available services are:
  ## "agents", "aggregates", "cinder_services", "flavors", "hypervisors",
  ## "networks", "nova_services", "ports", "projects", "servers",
  ## "serverdiagnostics", "services", "stacks", "storage_pools", "subnets",
  ## "volumes"
  # enabled_services = ["services", "projects", "hypervisors", "flavors", "networks", "volumes"]

  ## Query all instances of all tenants for the volumes and server services
  ## NOTE: Usually this is only permitted for administrators!
  # query_all_tenants = true

  ## output secrets (such as adminPass(for server) and UserID(for volume)).
  # output_secrets = false

  ## Amount of time allowed to complete the HTTP(s) request.
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## HTTP Proxy support
  # http_proxy_url = ""

  ## Optional TLS Config
  # tls_ca = /path/to/cafile
  # tls_cert = /path/to/certfile
  # tls_key = /path/to/keyfile
  ## Use TLS but skip chain & host verification
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

  ## Options for tags received from Openstack
  # tag_prefix = "openstack_tag_"
  # tag_value = "true"

  ## Timestamp format for timestamp data received from Openstack.
  ## If false format is unix nanoseconds.
  # human_readable_timestamps = false

  ## Measure Openstack call duration
  # measure_openstack_requests = false

Cortex

[[outputs.http]]
  ## Cortex Remote Write endpoint
  url = "http://cortex.example.com/api/v1/push"

  ## Use POST to send data
  method = "POST"

  ## Send metrics using Prometheus remote write format
  data_format = "prometheusremotewrite"

  ## Optional HTTP headers for authentication
  # [outputs.http.headers]
  #   X-Scope-OrgID = "your-tenant-id"
  #   Authorization = "Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN"

  ## Optional TLS configuration
  # tls_ca = "/path/to/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/path/to/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/path/to/key.pem"
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

  ## Request timeout
  timeout = "10s"

Input and output integration examples

OpenStack

1. Cross-Cloud Management: Leverage the OpenStack plugin to monitor and manage multiple OpenStack clouds from a single Telegraf instance. By aggregating metrics across different clouds, organizations can gain insights into resource utilization and optimize their cloud architecture for cost and performance.

2. Automated Scaling Based on Metrics: Integrate the metrics gathered from OpenStack into an automated scaling solution. For example, if the plugin detects that a specific service’s performance is degraded, it can trigger auto-scaling rules to launch additional instances, ensuring that system performance remains optimal under varying workloads.

3. Performance Monitoring Dashboard: Use data collected by the OpenStack Telegraf plugin to power real-time monitoring dashboards. This setup provides visualizations of key metrics from OpenStack services, enabling stakeholders to quickly identify trends, pinpoint issues, and make data-driven decisions in managing their cloud infrastructure.

4. Reporting and Analysis of Service Availability: By utilizing the metrics collected from various OpenStack services, teams can generate detailed reports on service availability and performance over time. This information can help identify recurring issues, improve service delivery, and make informed decisions regarding changes in infrastructure or service configuration.

Cortex

1. Unified Multi-Tenant Monitoring: Use Telegraf to collect metrics from different teams or environments and push them to Cortex with separate X-Scope-OrgID headers. This enables isolated data ingestion and querying per tenant, ideal for managed services and platform teams.

2. Extending Prometheus Coverage to Edge Devices: Deploy Telegraf on edge or IoT devices to collect system metrics and send them to a centralized Cortex cluster. This approach ensures consistent observability even for environments without local Prometheus scrapers.

3. Global Service Observability with Federated Tenants: Aggregate metrics from global infrastructure by configuring Telegraf agents to push data into regional Cortex clusters, each tagged with tenant identifiers. Cortex handles deduplication and centralized access across regions.

4. Custom App Telemetry Pipeline: Collect app-specific telemetry via Telegraf’s exec or http input plugins and forward it to Cortex. This allows DevOps teams to monitor app-specific KPIs in a scalable, query-efficient format while keeping metrics logically grouped by tenant or service.

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