Hi fellows, I've been thinking about it for a long while and had a chance to pitch that idea during the Mountpoint.io event. I think it's time to share it will all of you, present the idea & concepts to get your feedback on it. Deploying Ceph, but generally speaking any distributed software, means having a software running on a given set of nodes to gain a particular service : storage in our case. But what is the confidence level of people deploying it, that the platform is performing well before getting Ceph on it ? How much of the raw performance are you really using ? How far are you from what the platform is capable of ? Do you have any disk/interface/<place here any hardware device>/ slowing down the whole infra ? I'm pretty sure that people operating Ceph have usually no answer to that questions and the classical one is "it works good enough so no-one complains" or "someone prepared it, I trust what he did". And what would you do if someone says : "That's pretty curious, the Ceph cluster seems slower since /a couple of days/kernel upgrade/<place any reason here/. I'm still pretty sure that making the split between Ceph & platform responsibilities is almost impossible for many. There is were the project is starting. What should be the set of pre-flight checks to insure the platform doesn't have any mis-configuration or even damaged devices to deliver a good distributed service. To my understanding of that topic, the tool should: - be lightweight to be easily installed on hosts - application agnostic so it could be used for any distributed software : ceph-medic was made for detecting bad ceph's configuration while this tool will be focused on the platform - check status of network / storage / cpu / ram (bandwidth, latency, any specific metric) - generate some loads (network / storage / cpu / ram) to see the impact of one component to the whole platform - detect non-homogenous results / configuration (meaning that if a set of node is said to be identical, it have to be) - offer a good interface so everyone can use it - automated as its most to avoid complex cli/options/tuning to gain a good result - allow comparing results over time to analyze how much the platform changed over-time (install time vs incident time) I do think this will be helpful for - users - admins - support teams (bug triage, support level 1/2/3) - infra people that setup hw configurations - performance people I'm sending this email to the Ceph project because - I'm working on this beautiful software - Ceph's performance is very dependent from the quality of the platform, - I think it's the right place to bootstrap that project If you have some interest in that project, feel free to reply to this email and let's do it ! Erwan,
