Fork me on GitHub

Odac

Odac (Operations Dashboard for Apache CloudStack)

View the Project on GitHub chipchilders/odac

My other projects are on chipchilders.github.io.

Odac (Operations Dashboard for Apache CloudStack)

What's Odac all about?

I've been thinking about the Apache CloudStack UI's experience for operators, and although it's great in small environments, I believe that there could be significant improvement in the way that operators review and manage larger clouds. The layout of the native CloudStack UI is more focused on a graphical experience that helps explain the internal structure to the viewer. With a larger environment, the operator is (most likely) less interested in visually seeing relationships between the various infrastructure bits. What they want, is a dashboard view into their capacity (all available aspects), with drilldowns. They also need a much cleaner way to review the event stream that's generated by the system. To those ends, I started working on a project to create a prototype that might be one way to meet these needs.

The landing page shows the known zones:

The zone dashboard:

The zone historical capacity charts:

The event viewing page:

This is a fairly incomplete project at the moment so YMMV quite a bit.

Technical Summary

The project is broken up into three parts:

Obviously this requires a running CloudStack management server (configured with the RabbitMQ event handler). It also requires MongoDB to store the data from the 2 daemon processes.

The basic concept is that the cs-operator-dash Rails app is largely read-only, and works with data being populated into MongoDB via the two daemon processes. cs-operator-dash uses the Mongoid ORM to map the appropriate models to the collections being created by the back-end processes.

One of the main benefits to using a "collector > datastore < UI" architecture is that it allows the data to be stored as a historical record (that's how I get the trend lines).

License

Licensed via the ASLv2