Skip to main content

OpenStack Monasca

OpenStack Monasca is an open-source, multi-tenant monitoring-as-a-service (observability) project for OpenStack and cloud-native infrastructures that provides metrics, logs, and alarm management at scale.

  • Monitoring-as-a-service for OpenStack and cloud-native environments (observability)
  • Collection, storage, and querying of time-series metrics from cloud services and hosts (metrics monitoring)
  • Alarm definition, evaluation, and notification on metric thresholds and conditions (alerting)
  • Support for log aggregation and correlation with metric data (log management)
  • Multi-tenant design integrated with OpenStack identity and service components (cloud platform integration)

More About OpenStack Monasca

OpenStack Monasca is a monitoring-as-a-service (observability) project designed for OpenStack-based clouds and related cloud-native infrastructure. It targets the problem of operating large, multi-tenant environments that generate high volumes of metrics and logs, and where operators need centralized collection, storage, and alerting mechanisms aligned with OpenStack services and APIs.

The project focuses on metrics monitoring (infrastructure monitoring), providing components to ingest, process, and store time-series data from OpenStack services, virtual machines, and physical hosts. Monasca defines a Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API) (cloud API) for publishing and retrieving metrics, creating alarm definitions, and managing notifications. Its architecture includes an API service, a metrics engine, a database or time-series datastore, and agents or plugins that run on hosts or services to collect data. The system is designed for horizontal scalability and high availability in large cloud deployments.

Monasca also includes alarm management (alerting) capabilities. Users define alarms based on metric thresholds, aggregation functions, or composite conditions, and Monasca evaluates these definitions against incoming metric streams. When conditions are met, the service issues notifications to configured endpoints such as email, webhooks, or other external systems. This enables cloud operations teams to automate incident detection and integrate Monasca alarms into broader incident management workflows.

Log handling (log management) is another function associated with Monasca, where logs are collected and stored, and can be correlated with metrics for operational analysis. This supports troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) in OpenStack environments, where both service metrics and logs are relevant for diagnosing issues with compute, storage, or networking components.

In enterprise and institutional settings, Monasca is used as part of an OpenStack deployment to provide monitoring for core services such as compute, block storage, object storage, and networking, as well as for tenant workloads. Its multi-tenant model (multi-tenant observability) aligns with OpenStack Identity (Keystone) for authentication and authorization, enabling operators and tenants to access monitoring data according to project and domain boundaries. The system exposes APIs and plugins that can integrate with other OpenStack projects and external monitoring tools.

From a categorization perspective, OpenStack Monasca fits into observability and IT operations (IT operations management), covering metrics collection, time-series storage, alerting, and log handling for cloud infrastructures. It is positioned as an OpenStack ecosystem project that addresses monitoring requirements for private and public clouds built on the OpenStack platform.