Guru Meditation Reports

Guru Meditation Reports

Heat contains a mechanism whereby developers and system administrators can generate a report about the state of a running Heat executable. This report is called a Guru Meditation Report (GMR for short).

Generating a GMR

A GMR can be generated by sending the USR2 signal to any Heat process with support (see below). The GMR will then be outputted standard error for that particular process.

For example, suppose that heat-api has process id 10172, and was run with 2>/var/log/heat/heat-api-err.log. Then, kill -USR2 10172 will trigger the Guru Meditation report to be printed to /var/log/heat/heat-api-err.log.

Structure of a GMR

The GMR is designed to be extensible; any particular executable may add its own sections. However, the base GMR consists of several sections:

Package
Shows information about the package to which this process belongs, including version information
Threads
Shows stack traces and thread ids for each of the threads within this process
Green Threads
Shows stack traces for each of the green threads within this process (green threads don’t have thread ids)
Configuration
Lists all the configuration options currently accessible via the CONF object for the current process

Adding support for GMRs to new executable

Adding support for a GMR to a given executable is fairly easy.

First import the module (currently residing in oslo-incubator), as well as the Heat version module:

from oslo_reports import guru_meditation_report as gmr
from heat import version

Then, register any additional sections (optional):

TextGuruMeditation.register_section('Some Special Section',
                                    some_section_generator)

Finally (under main), before running the “main loop” of the executable (usually server.start() or something similar), register the GMR hook:

TextGuruMeditation.setup_autorun(version)

Extending the GMR

As mentioned above, additional sections can be added to the GMR for a particular executable. For more information, see the documentation about oslo.reports.

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