Overview¶
The Elasticsearch-Kibana Fuel Plugin is used to install and configure Elasticsearch and Kibana which collectively provide access to the OpenStack logs and notifications analytics. Those analytics can be used to search and correlate service-affecting events which occurred in your OpenStack environment. It is an indispensable tool to troubleshooting problems.
Elasticsearch and Kibana are key components of the LMA Toolchain project as shown in the figure below.
Requirements¶
| Requirement | Version/Comment |
|---|---|
| Disk space | The plugin’s specification requires to provision at least 15GB of disk space for the system, 10GB for the logs and 30GB for the database. As a result, the installation of the plugin will fail if there is less than 55GB of disk space available on the node. |
| Mirantis OpenStack | 8.0 |
| Hardware configuration | The hardware configuration (RAM, CPU, disk) required by this plugin depends on the size of your cloud environment and other parameters like the retention period and log level. A typical setup would at least require a quad-core server with 8GB of RAM and fast disks (ideally, SSDs). The actual disk space you need to run the plugin depends on several factors including the size of your OpenStack environment, the retention period, the logging level and workload. The more of the above, the more disk space you will need to run the Elaticsearch-Kibana Plugin. It is also highly recommended to use dedicated disk(s) for your data storage. |
Limitations¶
Currently, the maximum size of an Elasticsearch cluster that can be installed by Fuel is limited to five nodes. Each node of an Elasticsearch cluster is configured as master candidate and a storage node. This means, that each node of the Elasticsearch cluster can be elected as a master and all nodes will store data.
The cluster operations can require some manual operations some times.
Key terms, acronyms and abbreviations¶
| Terms & acronyms | Definition |
|---|---|
| LMA Collector | Logging, Monitoring and Alerting (LMA) Collector. A service running on each node which collects all the logs and the OpenStak notifications. |
| Elasticsearch | An open source (Apache Licensed) application based on the Lucene™ search engine that makes data like log messages easy to explore and correlate. Elasticsearch is written in Java and uses Lucene internally for all of its indexing and searching, but it aims to make full-text search easy by hiding the complexities of Lucene behind a simple, coherent, RESTful API. |
| Kibana | An open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is easy to setup and start using. |