Gnocchi 2.1 release

A little less than 2 months after our latest major release, here is the new minor version of Gnocchi, stamped 2.1.0. It was a smooth release, but with one major feature implemented by my fellow fantastic developer Mehdi Abaakouk: the ability to create resource types dynamically.

Resource types REST API

This new version of Gnocchi offers the long-awaited ability to create resource types dynamically. What does that mean? Well, until version 2.0, the resources that you were able to create in Gnocchi had a particular type that was defined in the code: instance, volume, SNMP host, Swift account, etc. All of them were tied to OpenStack, since it was our primary use case.

Now, the API allows to create resource types dynamically. This means you can create your own custom types to describe your own architecture. You then can exploit the same features that were offered before: history of your resources, searching through them, associating metrics, etc!

Performances improvement

We did some profiling on Gnocchi, and some benchmarks, and with the help of my fellow developer Gordon Chung, improved the metric performances.

The API speed improved a bit, and I've measured the Gnocchi API endpoint of being able to ingest up to 190k measures/s with only one node (the same as used in my previous benchmark) using uwsgi, so a 50 % improvement. The time required to compute aggregation on new measures is now also metered and displayed in the gnocchi-metricd log in debug mode. Handy to have an idea of how fast your measures are treated.

Ceph backend optimization

The Ceph back-end has been improved again by Mehdi. We're now relying on OMAP rather than xattr for finer grained control and better performance.

We already have a few new features being prepared for our next release, so stay tuned! And if you have any suggestion, feel free to say a word.