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OpenStack Panko

OpenStack Panko is an OpenStack telemetry component (cloud observability) that provides an event storage and indexing service for capturing, querying, and processing cloud infrastructure and service events.

  • Event storage and indexing service for OpenStack-generated events (cloud observability)
  • Normalization and persistence of telemetry events from multiple OpenStack services (cloud telemetry)
  • Query Application Programming Interface (API) for searching and filtering stored events based on metadata and traits (data access)
  • Integration point for analytics, monitoring, and auditing tools consuming OpenStack event streams (monitoring and analytics)
  • Component in the broader OpenStack Telemetry ecosystem alongside metering and alarming services (cloud platform)

More About OpenStack Panko

OpenStack Panko is an event storage and indexing project (cloud observability) within the OpenStack ecosystem, designed to handle telemetry events emitted by OpenStack services. It addresses the problem of capturing, organizing, and making queryable the lifecycle and operational events that occur across an OpenStack deployment, such as instance state changes, API calls, and system notifications. By separating event storage and query functions from metering and alarming components, Panko provides a focused service for event-centric data.

Panko ingests events from other OpenStack telemetry components (cloud telemetry), which typically collect and forward notifications and events produced by core services such as compute, networking, storage, and identity. These events are normalized into a consistent schema and stored in a back-end database selected by the operator, such as time-series or document-oriented data stores, depending on documented plugin support. Panko associates events with metadata and traits that describe context, enabling detailed filtering and correlation.

The project exposes a RESTful API (API services) that allows operators, tools, and higher-level analytics platforms to query stored events. Queries can filter by event type, time range, traits, or other metadata, enabling use cases such as operational troubleshooting, security auditing, compliance reporting, and capacity monitoring. Because Panko focuses on event data rather than metrics, it complements OpenStack components that handle samples, meters, or alarms, and fits into architectures that distinguish between event logs and numeric time-series metrics.

In enterprise environments, Panko is typically deployed as part of an OpenStack cloud to provide centralized access to event history across services (cloud platform operations). It supports integration with external monitoring, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), or analytics systems that retrieve events through the API or through connectors built on top of the telemetry pipeline. This enables organizations to maintain a unified view of operational events for governance and incident analysis while retaining OpenStack-native context such as project, user, and resource identifiers.

From an architectural perspective, Panko functions as an optional but focused telemetry component that interoperates with other OpenStack services through notifications and shared identity and policy mechanisms (cloud integration). It relies on OpenStack Keystone (identity and access) for authentication and authorization and follows OpenStack conventions for multi-tenancy and API design. In a technical directory, Panko aligns with categories such as cloud event storage, observability data services, and telemetry back ends, serving as the event indexing layer within OpenStack-based private or public cloud deployments.