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OpenStack Aodh

OpenStack Aodh is the alarming component of OpenStack Telemetry that evaluates Ceilometer-based metrics and triggers alarms on defined conditions for cloud resources (cloud monitoring and alerting).

  • Alarm evaluation service for OpenStack Telemetry metrics and events (cloud monitoring and alerting).
  • Threshold-based alarm rules on Ceilometer and other telemetry data sources (metrics and events monitoring).
  • Actions dispatch via webhooks, notifications, or integration points when alarm states change (event-driven automation).
  • Integration with other OpenStack services through Keystone authentication and resource metadata (cloud platform integration).
  • Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API) for managing alarm definitions, queries, and alarm lifecycle (API-based observability tooling).

More About OpenStack Aodh

OpenStack Aodh is the alarming service within the OpenStack Telemetry (cloud monitoring and alerting) stack, designed to evaluate metrics and events collected from OpenStack environments and generate alarms when configured conditions are met. It separates alarm evaluation from metric collection, which is handled by Ceilometer, and focuses on rule-based monitoring of cloud resources such as instances, volumes, and other infrastructure components. Aodh addresses the need for policy-driven alerting based on telemetry data in private and public OpenStack clouds.

Aodh provides an alarm engine (monitoring and alerting) that periodically evaluates alarm definitions against meters and statistics stored by telemetry backends. Users define alarm rules using thresholds, comparison operators, periods, and evaluation windows, enabling detection of conditions such as high Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage, low disk capacity, or other metric deviations. Aodh supports multiple alarm types, including threshold alarms on metrics and composite conditions, depending on the configuration and available telemetry sources in an OpenStack deployment.

The service exposes a REST API (API-based management) for creating, updating, listing, and deleting alarms, as well as querying current alarm states. This API is typically consumed by Horizon dashboards, orchestration engines, or custom enterprise tooling that need to subscribe to system health and capacity conditions. Aodh uses Keystone (identity and access management) for authentication and authorization, aligning with OpenStack’s multi-tenant security model and enabling project-scoped alarm definitions and access control.

When an alarm changes state, Aodh can invoke actions (event-driven automation) such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) callbacks, webhooks, or notifications to other OpenStack services or external systems. These actions support workflows like scaling operations through orchestration services, incident creation in IT service management platforms, or messaging into operations tooling. Aodh typically operates alongside Ceilometer and other telemetry components, using the same resource and metric model and sharing metadata about OpenStack resources.

In enterprise deployments, Aodh is positioned as part of the observability and operations toolchain for OpenStack-based infrastructure (cloud operations monitoring). It supports capacity management, Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring, and automated remediation workflows driven by metric conditions. Through its integration with the broader OpenStack ecosystem, including Horizon, Ceilometer, and orchestration services, Aodh provides a focused alarming and action framework built around OpenStack telemetry data and APIs.