OpenStack Monitoring Operations

Monitoring is the nervous system of a cloud deployment. Without it, operators fly blind -- problems are discovered by users instead of by automation. The monitoring stack provides continuous visibility into service health, resource utilization, and performance trends. When an operator asks "is the cloud healthy?" the answer comes from monitoring, not from guesswork.

The stack has three pillars: Prometheus collects and stores metrics (time-series data from every service, node, and container), Grafana visualizes those metrics (dashboards per service, alerting overview, capacity trends), and Alertmanager routes notifications when metrics cross thresholds (email, webhook, PagerDuty). Together they form a closed loop: collect, visualize, alert, act.

In NASA SE terms, monitoring maps to Phase E (Operations & Sustainment) -- continuous technical assessment through operational health monitoring, SLA tracking, and performance baseline comparison. The SURGEON agent is the primary consumer of this skill, using monitoring data for cloud health assessment. The GUARD agent consumes security-related metrics for posture evaluation.

Deploy

Kolla-Ansible Monitoring Deployment

globals.yml settings:

# Enable monitoring stack
enable_prometheus: "yes"
enable_grafana: "yes"