OpenStack Summit October 2015 Tokyo

Visualizing OpenStack data is one of the most powerful ways to make sense of what's going on with cloud-based resources. The OpenStack Horizon dashboard provides a number of built in visualizations, but how do we move beyond the features that are provided by Horizon to develop deeper or richer visualizations?

This presentation is based on our experience of developing the open source project Goldstone, and will discuss some of the challenges of making sense of OpenStack data, as well as demo some of the capabilities of D3.js.

One of the solutions our team has come up with for moving beyond Horizon was to develop software with an api-driven architecture that uncouples the data visualizations and the underlying data. Our client is built upon Backbone, a popular JavaScript framework, that sends ajax requests to the server component which is installed alongside an OpenStack cloud. One of our main challenges has been determining what data to gather, and how to make it relevant to an OpenStack operator. In addition to gathering metrics, we’ve developed a resource graph with the goal of finding the upstream source of problems in your cloud.

The software client we’re developing is built entirely in JavaScript, taking advantage of the Node.js JavaScript developer ecosystem tools such as Grunt, Karma, and Sass. And for the visualizations, we use D3.js, a low-level, highly customizable library for creating flexible, data-driven visualizations.

This presentation will include a walk-through of our learnings from developing Goldstone, a summary of some of the challenges of visualizing OpenStack our team has overcome, as well as a demo of some of the capabilities of D3.js.