openstack/cinder-specs
Code Issues Proposed changes
de4308f4a7
cinder-specs/specs/liberty/adopt-guru-meditation-report.rst
Sean McGinnis 5016627f04 Remove unit testing 
Spec repos do not have code to unit test. The gate job definition for
the py27 and py35 jobs skip if there doc only changes, which is all we
will ever have in the specs repo. Therefore the one "test" we had will
never be run.

We were using this unit test as a check for formatting issues with the
rst files. This was done before doc8 was available. Now that we can use
doc8, we should just switch to running that as part of the pep8 jobs.

Also fixes all the errors caught by doc8 that were not caught by our
unit test check.

Change-Id: Ida20764edde3a07c89703d82b41958c96548b239
2017-11-17 00:21:26 +00:00

4.6 KiB
Raw Blame History

Adopt Guru Meditation report

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cinder/+spec/guru-meditation-report

This spec proposes adoption for Oslo Guru Meditation reports in Cinder. The new feature will enhance debugging capabilities of all official Cinder services, by providing an easy way to gather runtime data about current threads and configuration, among other things, to developers, operators, and tech support.

Problem description

Currently Cinder does not have a way to gather runtime data from active service processes. The only information that is available to deployers, developers, and tech support to analyze is what was actually logged by the service in question. Additional data could be usefully used to debug and solve problems that occur during Cinder operation. Among other things, we could be interested in stack traces of all (both green and real) threads, pid/ppid info, package version, configuration as seen by the service, etc.

Oslo Guru reports provide an easy way to add support for gathering this kind of information to any service. Report generation is triggered by sending a special (USR1) signal to a service. Reports are generated on stderr, that can be piped into system log, if needed.

Use Cases

Guru reports are extensible, meaning that we will be able to add more information to those reports in case we see it needed.

Guru reports has been supported by Nova.

Proposed change

First, a new oslo-incubator module (reports.*) should be synchronized into cinder tree. Then, each service entry point should be extended to register reporting functionality before proceeding to its real main().

Data model impact

None.

REST API impact

None.

Security impact

In theory, the change could expose service internals to someone who is able to send the needed signal to a service. That said, we can probably assume that the user is already authorized to achieve a lot more than just having an access to stack traces and configuration used. Also, if deployers are afraid of the information leak for some reason, they could also make sure their stderr output is channeled into safe place.

Because this report is triggered by user, there is no need to add config option to turn on/off this feature.

Notifications impact

None.

Other end user impact

None.

Performance Impact

The feature does not require any additional resources until it's triggered by the user. Default report generation is not expected to take too long. Report extensions will need to be assessed on case by case basis. In any case, reports are not expected to be generated too often and are assumed to be debugging capability, not something to trigger once per minute just in case.

IPv6 Impact

None.

Other deployer impact

Deployers may be interested in making sure those reports are collected somewhere (e.g. stderr should be captured by syslog).

Developer impact

None.

Community Impact

None.

Alternatives

We could reimplement the wheel, but we hopefully won't.

Implementation

Assignee(s)

wanghao

Work Items

  • sync reports.* module from oslo-incubator
  • adopt it in all cinder services using a wrapper located under cinder/cmd/...

Dependencies

reports.* module is currently going thru graduation consideration. In case it's graduated into oslo.reports library before cinder switches to it, we won't actually need to sync any code from oslo-incubator but instead add a new external oslo dependency. If Cinder switches to the module before graduation is complete, then we'll need to adopt oslo.reports later as part of usual oslo liaison effort.

Testing

Automated tests are needed to ensure the guru report is working correctly.

Documentation Impact

User documentation will need to be updated to introduce this changes.

Developer documentation should be updated to include information on how to add support for the reporting feature.

References