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Monitoring an OpenStack Cloud: Tools, Metrics, and Alert Fatigue

Ruchi RoyRuchi Roy

OpenStack gets noisy fast. Atmosphere cuts through it with real metrics, real logs, and real alerts, so teams can fix issues before users notice.

Operating OpenStack at scale means tracking dozens of interdependent services across compute, storage, and networking. Teams need to monitor virtual machine (VM) provisioning, API responsiveness, network agent behavior, storage pool health, and SO MUCH more. Without the right visibility, issues can escalate before anyone notices. 

Atmosphere includes an integrated observability stack that covers real-time monitoring, log aggregation, tracing, and alerting. These tools give operators and SREs what they need to troubleshoot quickly, maintain reliability, and scale confidently. 

Metrics and Dashboards That Reflect Operational Reality 

Atmosphere uses Prometheus to capture metrics across OpenStack and Kubernetes layers. This includes everything from nova-scheduler queue length to Ceph pool rebalance activity. 

Grafana dashboards are preconfigured with views for Nova, Neutron, Glance, Keystone, and Ceph. These dashboards track resource saturation, error rates, service availability, and usage patterns. Each chart has been built based on what operators need during active troubleshooting, and not generic infrastructure templates. 

Teams can also define custom metrics to support internal SLAs or tenant-specific KPIs. 

Centralized Logging for Faster Debugging 

OpenStack issues often require context across multiple services. A failed VM launch may touch Nova, Glance, Cinder, and Neutron. Atmosphere uses centralized logging tools like Elasticsearch or Loki to collect logs across all layers. 

Logs are indexed and structured so that users can query based on instance UUIDs, tenant IDs, service names, or error patterns. Pre-built queries make it easier to identify known issues, such as repeated API timeouts or volume attach retries.  

Log retention policies are configurable, allowing operators to control disk usage while retaining historical data for audits or long-term troubleshooting. 

Tracing Slowdowns and Failures Across Services 

Distributed requests often span multiple OpenStack components. Tracing tools like OpenTelemetry and Jaeger are integrated into Atmosphere so teams can follow a request as it moves through Horizon, Keystone, Nova, and downstream storage or networking. 

Traces are useful when dealing with API slowness, resource creation delays, or unresponsive endpoints. They show where the time is spent, what services introduce latency, and what downstream failures block progress. 

Root cause analysis becomes easier when there’s a clear view of the request lifecycle. 

Curated Alerts Minus the Overwhelm 

Alert fatigue is a common issue in large OpenStack deployments. Atmosphere includes over 300 pre-built alert rules, developed based on real production incidents. 

These alerts are tied to service degradation, not just metric thresholds. Examples include prolonged instance boot failures, DHCP agent drops that affect tenant networking, Ceph replication slowdowns, and nova-compute service flaps. 

Prometheus Alertmanager handles routing and deduplication, and teams can integrate with tools like PagerDuty or Slack. Every alert is mapped to a clear operational consequence. 

Kubernetes Layer Observability 

Atmosphere provisions Kubernetes clusters using Magnum and integrates observability directly into those clusters. 

Metrics Server provides real-time resource usage for pods and nodes. Logs from workloads and cluster components are shipped to the same central log store. Health and self-healing events, such as pod evictions or container restarts, are monitored and visible alongside the OpenStack infrastructure that powers them. 

This allows teams to see the complete picture, whether the issue is inside a container or in the infrastructure beneath it. 

Capacity Planning and Resource Forecasting 

Atmosphere includes a usage service that provides detailed reporting on how infrastructure resources are consumed across environments. These reports are generated with millisecond precision and include a wide range of metrics across compute, storage, networking, and orchestration services.  

Operators can view usage reports per tenant or project, identify patterns over time, and forecast when capacity needs to expand. Dashboards show which availability zones are approaching saturation and which services are underutilized. When historical data is tied directly to resource behavior, planning becomes easier.

Teams need context, structure, and tools that connect symptoms to causes. Atmosphere delivers observability that reflects how real infrastructure behaves - through metrics, logs, traces, and alerts that are tightly integrated and production-tested. 

By including these capabilities from the start, Atmosphere gives operators the confidence to scale, troubleshoot quickly, and keep systems stable even when something goes wrong. 

If you’d like to bring Atmosphere into your organization with the help of our team of experts, our team can provide you with professional services for deployment, subscription to provide full 24x7x365 support for Atmosphere (including OpenStack, Ceph & more) or a full hands-free remote operations, reach out to our sales team today!

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Monitoring an OpenStack Cloud: Metrics & Alert Fatigue