After 6 months of development, we are proud to release the first release of Ceilometer, the OpenStack Metering project. Ceilometer. This is a first and amazing milestone for us: we follow all other projects by releasing a version for Folsom!

Using Ceilometer, you should now be able to meter your OpenStack cloud and retrieve its usage to build statistics or bill your customer!

You can read our announcement on the OpenStack mailing list.

Architecture

We spent a good amount of time defining and refining our architecture.

One of its important point, is that it has been designed to work without modifying any of the existing core components. Patching OpenStack components in an intrusive way to meter them was not an option for now, simply because we had no legitimacy to do so. This may change in the future, and this will likely be discussed next week during the OpenStack Summit.

Meters

Initially, we defined a bunch of meters we'd like to have for a first release, and in the end, most of them are available. Some of them are still missing, like OpenStack Object Storage (Swift) ones, mainly due to lack of interest from the involved parties so far.

Anyhow, with this first release, you should be able to meter your instances, their network usage, memory, CPU. Images, networks and volumes and their CRUD operations are metered too. For more detail, you can read the complete list of implemented meters.

REST API

The HTTP REST API has been partially implemented. The provided methods should allow basic integration with a billing system.

DreamHost is using Ceilometer in their deployment architecture and coupling it with their billing system!

Towards Grizzly

We don't have a clear and established road-map for Grizzly yet.

We already have a couple of patches waiting in the queue to be merged, like the use of Keystone to authenticate API request and the removal of Nova DB access.

On my side, these last days I've been working on a small debug user interface for the API. Ceilometer API server will return this interface if your do an API request from a browser (i.e. requesting text/html instead of application/json).

I hope this will help to discover Ceilometer API more easily for new comers and leverage it to build powerful tools!

Anyhow, we have tons of idea and work to do, and I'm sure the upcoming weeks will be very interesting. Also, we hope to be able to become an OpenStack incubated project soon. So stay tuned!