Telemetry Data Collection service overview¶

The Telemetry Data Collection services provide the following functions:

• Efficiently polls metering data related to OpenStack services.
• Collects event and metering data by monitoring notifications sent from services.
• Publishes collected data to various targets including data stores and message queues.

The Telemetry service consists of the following components:

A compute agent (ceilometer-agent-compute)

Runs on each compute node and polls for resource utilization statistics.

A central agent (ceilometer-agent-central)

Runs on a central management server to poll for resource utilization statistics for resources not tied to instances or compute nodes. Multiple agents can be started to scale service horizontally.

A notification agent (ceilometer-agent-notification)

Runs on a central management server(s) and consumes messages from the message queue(s) to build event and metering data.

A collector (ceilometer-collector)

Runs on central management server(s) and dispatches collected telemetry data to a data store or external consumer without modification. This service is optional as the ceilometer-agent-notification service can be configured to provide the equivalent functionality.

These services communicate by using the OpenStack messaging bus. Ceilometer data is designed to be published to various endpoints for storage and analysis.