Monasca

Monasca is an open source monitoring-as-a-service (observability) project under the OpenStack and OpenInfra ecosystem that collects, processes, stores, and serves metrics, logs, and alarms for cloud and infrastructure platforms.

• Monitoring-as-a-service platform for metrics, logs, and alarms (observability)
• Horizontally scalable, distributed monitoring architecture (infrastructure monitoring)
• Multi-tenant Application Programming Interface (API) for metrics ingestion, querying, and alarm management (cloud operations)
• Pluggable pipeline for data collection and integration with agents and external systems (telemetry collection)
• Support for threshold-based alarms and notification workflows (event management)

More About Monasca

Monasca is a monitoring-as-a-service (observability) project in the OpenStack ecosystem designed to provide metrics, logging, and alarm management for cloud infrastructure and services. It addresses the need for a multi-tenant, horizontally scalable monitoring system that can operate alongside other OpenStack services and within open infrastructure environments. The project focuses on collection, storage, and analysis of time-series metrics and logs, along with rule-based alerting and notification capabilities suitable for large deployments.

The Monasca architecture (infrastructure monitoring) is built as a distributed system with components for metric ingestion, transformation, storage, and querying. It exposes RESTful APIs (API services) for metrics, logs, and alarms, allowing operators and integrated services to push and retrieve monitoring data programmatically. Metrics are stored as time-series data, and the system supports querying over dimensions such as resource identifiers, service names, and custom metadata. Log handling (log management) is available through a dedicated log API and associated processing pipeline, enabling storage and retrieval of log records for analysis and troubleshooting.

Monasca includes an alarm engine (event management) that evaluates metric streams against configurable rules. Users can define alarm definitions based on thresholds, aggregation functions, and time windows. When conditions are met, Monasca generates alarm state changes and can trigger notification workflows. A notification engine integrates with channels such as email or webhooks, depending on deployment configuration, enabling automated responses or integration with external incident management systems.

For data collection (telemetry collection), Monasca works with agents and plugins that run on hosts or within services to gather system metrics, service-level indicators, and application-specific measurements. These agents typically publish data to the Monasca API or an underlying message queue, depending on deployment design. The platform is designed to support high-volume metric ingestion suitable for cloud-scale environments, using back-end components such as scalable time-series databases or storage engines described in its documentation.

In enterprise and institutional environments (IT operations), Monasca is deployed as part of OpenStack-based clouds or other open infrastructure stacks to provide unified monitoring across compute, storage, and networking resources. Its multi-tenant model aligns with cloud operators that host multiple projects or organizational units, enforcing data separation and access control through integration with OpenStack identity services where configured. Operators can use Monasca dashboards or integrate the APIs with other visualization tools to present metrics and alarms to operations teams.

From a categorization standpoint, Monasca fits into the observability and monitoring domain, covering metrics, logs, and alerting (observability platform). It functions as a backend monitoring service that can be used directly by cloud operators, integrated services, or higher-level management portals. Its API-driven design, support for scalable storage back ends, and alignment with OpenStack services position it as a monitoring building block for open infrastructure deployments that require programmatic telemetry, alarm evaluation, and notifications at cloud scale.