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Panko

Panko is an OpenStack Telemetry component that provides an Application Programming Interface (API) service for storing and querying event data generated by OpenStack services (observability/telemetry).

  • Event storage and indexing for OpenStack-generated notifications (observability/telemetry)
  • Representational State Transfer (REST) API for querying and filtering events by traits, timestamps, and other attributes (API/data access)
  • Decoupled event repository independent of metering and alarm services in Telemetry (cloud infrastructure management)
  • Supports pluggable back-end storage drivers, such as document or time-series databases, depending on deployment choices (data persistence)
  • Integrates with other OpenStack projects that emit notifications via the message bus, enabling unified access to event history (cloud platform integration)

More About Panko

Panko is part of the OpenStack Telemetry family and targets the storage and retrieval of event data emitted by OpenStack services (observability/telemetry). It focuses on capturing structured events from the OpenStack notification system and exposing them through a dedicated API, separating event handling from metrics and alarms.

The project addresses the need for durable, queryable event history in OpenStack environments, where services publish notifications about state changes, lifecycle events, and operational activities (cloud infrastructure management). Instead of treating these notifications as transient messages, Panko persists them in a back-end data store and indexes relevant traits so that operators and tooling can query them after the fact.

Panko provides a RESTful API layer that lets users and services list events, filter them by time range, event type, and trait values, and retrieve event details in structured form (API/data access). Events are modeled with a set of traits that describe context such as resource identifiers, project and user Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and operational metadata, which enables correlation and analysis across services.

Under the hood, Panko uses a pluggable storage architecture that supports different database back ends selected at deployment time (data persistence). Operators can configure storage drivers compatible with their operational and scaling requirements, allowing Panko to sit on top of document-oriented or other supported databases as described in its official configuration guides. This design lets cloud providers integrate Panko into existing database infrastructure while maintaining a consistent API surface.

In enterprise or institutional OpenStack clouds, Panko is deployed alongside other Telemetry components and integrated with the message bus that carries notifications from core services such as compute, storage, and networking (cloud platform integration). By centralizing event data, it supports audit trails, troubleshooting workflows, and higher-level analytics that depend on historical event context.

From a taxonomy perspective, Panko fits into the observability and telemetry layer of OpenStack, specifically as an event repository and query service (observability/telemetry). It functions as an infrastructure data service that complements metrics collection and alarm management by focusing on structured events and their traits. This role makes it relevant to architects and operators designing logging, monitoring, and compliance data pipelines within OpenStack-based private or public clouds.