Managing the capacity of your OpenStack infrastructure
As a Capacity Planner or OpenStack Technology Specialist, you can use BMC Helix Capacity Optimization to configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your OpenStack infrastructure.
As the flow diagram illustrates, the data source (OpenStack ETL or Gateway Server) collects data from the OpenStack infrastructure elements. The collected data is transferred to the data warehouse where it is processed, and then displayed on the user interface. You can use the product features to review, analyze, and manage the capacity of your OpenStack infrastructure.
The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:
Managing the capacity of OpenStack infrastructure
You can analyze and manage the capacity of your OpenStack infrastructure providers by using the OpenStack view. For the data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first set up the data sources to collect data.
Step 1. Collect data and install the views
As an Administrator, you can use one of the following methods for data collection:
- Using the out-of-the-box ETLs:
- Using the Capacity Agents
After data collection starts, data is loaded in the data warehouse daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace.
As an Administrator, you must install the OpenStack views and Capacity Pools view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and OpenStack Technology Specialists to access these views.
Step 2. Analyze the collected data
To get a high-level view of the infrastructure usage and health, use the out-of-the-box capacity pools in the Capacity-Pools-view.
For detailed analysis, use the OpenStack view.
The following common use cases are described here:
Understand the usage and health of your OpenStack domain
Review and analyze the out-of-the-box capacity pools for OpenStack regions and cloud for a high-level understanding of their health and usage. For more information, see OpenStack-view.
You can drill down into a specific cloud and further into a region for detailed analysis. For more information, see the Cloud page and Regions page in the OpenStack view.
Understand the resource utilization of your Availability zones
Review and analyze the relevant metrics on the Availability zones page in the OpenStack view to determine the available resources and their utilization per zone. For example, utilization metrics for CPU, Memory, and Datastore.
Identify OpenStack infrastructure elements that have efficiency issues
Review the Hypervisors table on the Hypervisors-page-in-the-OpenStack-view page to identify the resource utilization of the hosts of the respective virtualization technology.
Hypervisors can be of type VMWare Cluster, VMWare Host, or KVM Host.
Identify the OpenStack tenants that are at risk of saturation or already saturated
Use the Tenants-page-in-the-OpenStack-view page to review and identify the tenants that are at risk of saturation or already saturated.
You can drill down into a specific tenant for detailed analysis.
Identify OpenStack infrastructure elements that have efficiency issues
Use the Recommendations page in the OpenStack Infrastructure view to get a quick view of the OpenStack infrastructure elements that have a capacity risk or an efficiency issue. The page also provides actionable recommendations to help you resolve the issue.
Performing advanced analysis
The earlier sections explained how you can use the out-of-the-box capacity views to manage your environment. These capacity views help you analyze your Azure infrastructure using a predefined set of metrics.
To perform advanced analysis on the imported Azure data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, you can use Analysis.
Here are some use cases for which you can create and use Analyses:
For more examples, see Creating-an-analysis.
Analyze the disk activity of the host over time and understand the trend
Analyse the application wise CPU utilization on the host
- Create an analysis.
See sample configuration values:
- Review the analysis results.
The analysis results are shown in a tabular format. The summary table shows the application wise CPU utilization for the host.
Managing future demand
By using the capacity views and analysis charts, you can analyze the data of your existing capacity. To predict and plan your IT resource needs, use Models.
This topic describes the following use case:
Predicting the behavior of your resources
Use Models to predict service performance and obtain forecasts of historical series of metrics, including deep details on the modeling techniques used in forecasts and how to interpret the results of model runs.
For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.