OpenStack and Splunk Integration

Input and output integration overview

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

This output plugin facilitates direct streaming of Telegraf collected metrics into Splunk via the HTTP Event Collector, enabling easy integration with Splunk’s powerful analytics platform.

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.

Splunk

Use Telegraf to easily collect and aggregate metrics from many different sources and send them to Splunk. Utilizing the HTTP output plugin combined with the specialized Splunk metrics serializer, this configuration ensures efficient data ingestion into Splunk’s metrics indexes. The HEC is an advanced mechanism provided by Splunk designed to reliably collect data at scale via HTTP or HTTPS, providing critical capabilities for security, monitoring, and analytics workloads. Telegraf’s integration with Splunk HEC streamlines operations by leveraging standard HTTP protocols, built-in authentication, and structured data serialization, optimizing metrics ingestion and enabling immediate actionable insights.

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

Splunk

[[outputs.http]]
  ## Splunk HTTP Event Collector endpoint
  url = "https://splunk.example.com:8088/services/collector"

  ## HTTP method to use
  method = "POST"

  ## Splunk authentication token
  headers = {"Authorization" = "Splunk YOUR_SPLUNK_HEC_TOKEN"}

  ## Serializer for formatting metrics specifically for Splunk
  data_format = "splunkmetric"

  ## Optional parameters
  # timeout = "5s"
  # insecure_skip_verify = false
  # tls_ca = "/path/to/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/path/to/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/path/to/key.pem"

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.

Splunk

1. Real-Time Security Analytics: Utilize this plugin to stream security-related metrics from various applications into Splunk in real-time. Organizations can detect threats instantly by correlating data streams across systems, significantly reducing detection and response times.

2. Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring: Integrate Telegraf to consolidate metrics from multi-cloud environments directly into Splunk, enabling comprehensive visibility and operational intelligence. This unified monitoring allows teams to detect performance issues quickly and streamline cloud resource management.

3. Dynamic Capacity Planning: Deploy the plugin to continuously push resource metrics from container orchestration platforms (like Kubernetes) into Splunk. Leveraging Splunk’s analytics capabilities, teams can automate predictive scaling and resource allocation, avoiding resource bottlenecks and minimizing costs.

4. Automated Incident Response Workflows: Combine this plugin with Splunk’s alerting system to create automated incident response workflows. Metrics collected by Telegraf trigger real-time alerts and automated remediation scripts, ensuring rapid resolution and maintaining high system availability.

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