Analysis of Infrastructure Monitoring Requirements for OpenStack Nova

Nova, the compute component of open source cloud platform OpenStack, is responsible for provisioning and management of virtual machines. For the provision of services, compute requires large amount of physical and logical infrastructure. There is a need for monitoring the infrastructure in order to gauge resource utilization, proper functioning and performance of the system. Though several tools exist, a well-defined list of parameters and processes to be monitored within Nova is lacking. In this paper, we identify and present a list of attributes required for monitoring the infrastructure and processes associated with OpenStack Nova. Different categories within infrastructure monitoring are identified, and monitoring parameters associated with them are listed. The proposed list has been applied to three existing software commonly used for monitoring OpenStack Nova. The list facilitates system administrators during selection of existing monitoring software for Nova and will be of help to the developers in selecting monitoring functionality for new monitoring software.