Artifice is a layer sitting on top of Ceilometer to provide easy interactions with ERP systems, by exposing a configurable interface for turning Ceilometer data into a single billable line item.

Artifice provides hooks to integrate with arbitrary ERP systems, by not imposing logic beyond the concept of a dated invoice that covers a given range.

What the ranges are, and how Ceilometer data is aggregated is intended to be configurable.

Artifice enforces its own rigid postgresql-backed data store, used to store what data has been billed, and for what time range. This is used by Artifice to add prevention of repeated billing of a range of data.

The Artifice data store will prevent overlapping bills for a given tenant and resource ever being stored, while still allowing for regeneration of a given invoice statement.

Requirements:

Artifice requires:

Postgresql 9.1 or greater.
Python >=2.7.5, <3.0
Python modules:
- pyaml
- mock
- requests
OpenStack Grizzly or greater
Openstack-Keystone
Openstack-Ceilometer

Installation

Installing Artifice is as simple as: dpkg -i openstack-artifice-.deb

The library will be installed to /opt/stack/artifice, and the command-line tool 'artifice' will be added to the path.

Configuration

Configuring Artifice is handled through its primary configuration file, stored in /etc/openstack/artifice.conf.

This is a yaml-format config file, in the format of:

# Defines the database connection logic. This will be converted to a standard
# database connection string.
database:
  database: artifice
  host: localhost
  password: aurynn
  port: '5433'
  username: aurynn
# Configuration passed to the invoice system. This is arbitrary and may be
# anything that the invoice object may require.
invoice:config:
  delimiter: ','
  output_file: '%(tenant)s-%(start)s-%(end)s.csv'
  output_path: /opt/openstack/artifice/invoices
  row_layout:
  - location
  - type
  - start
  - end
  - amount
  - cost
main:
  # What invoice object we should be using
  invoice:object: billing.csv_invoice:Csv
# Configuration for OpenStack
openstack:
  # Location of the Keystone host
  authentication_url: http://foo
  # Location of the Ceilometer host
  ceilometer_url: http://localhost:8777
  # Default tenant to connect to. As this
  default_tenant: demo
  # Username to use
  username: foo
  # Password
  password: bar

A sample configuration is included, but must be modified appropriately.

Setup of Openstack environment

As mentioned, Artifice relies entirely on the Ceilometer project for its metering and measurement collection.

All development has (so far) occurred using a DevStack installation, but a production Ceilometer installation should work as expected.

DevStack

Installation on DevStack is relatively easy. First, prep the VM with DevStack. Since we need Ceilometer installed, we recommend a DevStack localrc similar to:

ADMIN_PASSWORD=openstack
MYSQL_PASSWORD=openstack
RABBIT_PASSWORD=openstack
SERVICE_PASSWORD=openstack

# Enable Quantum
disable_service n-net
enable_service q-svc
enable_service q-agt
enable_service q-dhcp
enable_service q-l3
enable_service q-meta
enable_service quantum

# Enable Swift
enable_service swift

# Enable ceilometer!
enable_service ceilometer-acompute,ceilometer-acentral,ceilometer-collector,ceilometer-api

A localrc file can be found at devstack/localrc

Create your VM and install DevStack into it. A Vagrant-compatible bootstrap script that will install most of the necessary components is included in this distribution, at devstack/bootstrap.sh

Install Artifice and the packages it depends on from the Debian repositories.

Artifices' post-intallation hooks will have set up the Postgres database as expected, and Artifice will be ready to run.

Production OpenStack

TODO: Fill this out

Using Artifice

As mentioned, Artifice comes with a command-line tool to provide some simple commands.

Actions one can perform with Artifice are:

Bill; Given a date range, generates the current usage bill for a tenant. This will result in a CSV file.

Future things

Eventually we also want Artifice to:

List current usage numbers
List historic usage numbers
Re-generate billing information

Things we may eventually want include:

Listing this months' total usage of a given resource
Listing total usage by datacentre
Listing all usage ever
Etc

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