Production Rules Engine

This document describes rule engine used for inspection and diagnostics of OpenStack configuration.

Summary

The consistent configuration across all components is essential to OpenStack cloud operation. If something is wrong with configuration, you as an operator will know this immidiately either from monitoring or clients complaining. But diagnosing the exact problem is always a challenge, given the number of components and configuration options per component.

You could think about troubleshooting OpenStack as going through some scenarios which can be expressed as sets of rules. Your configuration must comply to all those rules to be operational. On the other hand, if you know rules which your configuration breaks, you can identify incorrect parameters reliably and easy. That is how production rule systems and diagnostic systems work.

Example production rule

Example production rule for OpenStack system would be:

Given (condition_parameter_1) is (value) and
(condition_parameter_2) is (value)
then (check_parameter_1) must be (value)

Rule-based inspection

All rule-based inspections are using pre-defined actions written in python, currently they are defined in "steps.py" file in the directory: rubick/inspections/lettuce. They are based on lettuce framework -bdd framework for python.

Store and reuse rules

First version of Rubick project stores rules to text files and loads them to memory at runtime. You can add your own rules to the set using web UI, and those rules can be saved to files for persistence.

In future versions, we plan to add module which will save rules to database. It will also support migrating existing rule set to the database.

You can store your rules wherever you want and add it through the UI or simply by putting them in text files in directory rubick/inspections/lettuce. Rules file must have name in the following format:

\*.feature

The main requirement is that all rule conditions and actions in those files must be written in accordance with code of rule steps in ostack-validator/inspections/lettuce/steps.py.

Extending rules

Also you can extend rules definition by adding your own steps to steps.py. As an example:

#This decorator is for defining step for using them in the scenario.
@step(r'Nova has "(.+)" equal to "(.*)"')
def nova_has_property(step, name, value):
    name = subst(name)
        value = subst(value)

            for nova in [c for c in world.openstack.components if
            c.name.startswith('nova')]:
                if not nova.config[name] == value:
                    stop()

New methods can use 2 classes from the inspections framework: rubick/model.py and rubick/common.py. There you can find many adapters to OpenStack services configuration data and all additional information collected from OpenStack nodes. After that you can use you brand new rule in the scenarios as described above.

In module rubick/common.py you can find Inspection, Issue, Mark, Error and Version classes for your convenience in rule defining. Module model.py contains Openstack model based on configuration schemas.

Default rule sets

We plan to provide 2 rule sets with Rubick initial version:

healthcheck or sanity rule set
best practices rule set

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