Pulse Plugin ¶

Contents

Pulse Plugin

Overview ¶

The Pulse plugin is designed for visualization of virtual machines performance statistics. Currently, this CloudStack-UI extension is only compatible with ACS clusters that use the KVM hypervisor. With help of sensors that collect virtual machines performance statistics via the Libvirt API and store them in an InfluxDB datastore and RESTful statistics server, CloudStack-UI is able to display CPU, RAM, disk IO and network traffic utilization in the form of convenient visual charts.

In general, the plugin works as it is presented in the figure below:

A sensor connects to a virtual machine, collects its performance statistics via the Libvirt API, and stores it in InfluxDB datastore. Users interact with the plugin via CloudStack-UI. They specify parameters to build reports. These parameters are sent to RESTful server that gets corresponding data from the InfluxDB datastore and returns it to UI where it is presented as convenient visual charts.

Pulse allows users of Apache CloudStack to monitor current and previous operational states of virtual machines. The plugin supports various view scales like minutes, hours, days and enables data overlays to monitor peak and average values.

We consider this plugin very important for the CloudStack ecosystem as currently there is no built-in functionality to track VM operational states, although it is vital for system administrators to successfully operate virtual servers.

Plugin deployment and configuration Instructions can be found below.

Deployment Instructions ¶

Note

The Pulse plugin works only for KVM hypervisor right now.

Please, make sure that you have cs-pulse-server and cs-pulse-sensor to be able to work with the Pulse plugin.

To enable the Pulse plugin you need:

Configure plugin in config.json.
Run docker container with a correctly specified cs-pulse-server endpoint.

Pulse configuration ¶

Please, enable pulse in the extensions section of the config.json:

"extensions": {
  ...,
  "pulse": true
}

Running cloudstack-ui docker container ¶

docker run -d -p 80:80 --name cloudstack-ui \
           ...
           -e PULSE_PLUGIN_ENDPOINT=http://url/to/cs-pulse-server \
           ...
           -v /path/to/config.json:/static/config/config.json \
           bwsw/cloudstack-ui

Pulse Plugin¶

Overview¶

Deployment Instructions¶

Pulse configuration¶

Running cloudstack-ui docker container¶