Infrastucture Metadata Scraper

The aim of this project is to acquire live infrastructure topology data from any resource provider for further relational analysis and visualisations.

Metadata Collection

The pull approach for scraping endpoint APIs is supported for the moment, but the processing push from target services will be supported.

Currently supported resource metadata providers are:

• Kubernetes clusters
• OpenStack clouds
• Amazon web services
• SaltStack infrastructures
• Terraform templates
• Jenkins pipelines

The following resource providers are to be intergrated in near future.

• GCE and Azure clouds
• Cloudify TOSCA blueprints
• MAAS servers
• JUJU templates

From these resource providers we are able to capture all available resources for given

Relational Analysis

The output of scraping is directed graph that can be subject for further analysis. We can perform several transformation functions on the graphs.

Graph Analysis

You can alter the scraped strusctured in several ways. Either you want to get the subset of the resources (vertices and edges) or you want to combine multiple graphs and link the same nodes in each.

Subgraphs - Slicing and Dicing

To slice and dice is to break a body of information down into smaller parts or to examine it from different viewpoints that we can understand it better.

In cooking, you can slice a vegetable or other food or you can dice it (which means to break it down into small cubes). One approach to dicing is to first slice and then cut the slices up into dices.

In data analysis, the term generally implies a systematic reduction of a body of data into smaller parts or views that will yield more information. The term is also used to mean the presentation of information in a variety of different and useful ways. In our case we find useful subgraphs of the infrastructures.

For example in OpenStack infrastructure we can show the aggregate zone -hypervisor - instance relations and show the quantitative properties of hypervisors and instances. The properties can be used RAM or CPU, runtime -the age of resources or any other property of value.

Another example would be filtering of resources by tenant or stack attributions. This reduces the number of nodes to the reasonable amount.

Inter-graphs

On other hand you want to combine several graphs to create one overlaying graph. This is very useful to combine in other ways undelated resources. For example we can say that OpenStack Server or AWS Instance and Salt Minion are really the same resources.

Data Corellations

With the relational information we are now able to corellate resources and joined topologies from varius information sources. This gives you the real power, while having the underlying relational structure, you can gather unstructured metrics, events, alarms and put them into proper context in you managed resources.

Metrics Corellations

The metrics collected from you infrastrucute can be assigned to various vertices and edges in your network. This can give you more insight to the utilisation of depicted infrastructures.

You can have the following query to the prometheus server that gives you the rate of error response codes goint through a HAproxy for example.

sum(irate(haproxy_http_response_5xx{
    proxy=~"glance.*",
    sv="FRONTEND"
}[5m]))

Or you can have the query with the same result to the InfluxDB server:

SELECT sum("count")
    FROM "openstack_glance_http_response_times"
    WHERE "hostname" =~ /$server/
        AND "http_status" = '5xx'
        AND $timeFilter
    GROUP BY time($interval)
fill(0)

Having these metrics you can assign numerical properties of your relational nodes with these values and use them in correct context.

Events Corellations

As you can query the time-series databases, you are able to query also the ElasticSearch for events.

"searchSourceJSON": {
    "index": "log-*",
    "query": {
        "query_string": {
            "query": "*",
            "analyze_wildcard": true
        }
    },
    "filter": []
}

The events are transformed to numerical representation and create again numerical properies of both nodes and vertices.

Alarms Corellations

You can corellate the output of the alarm evaluators to dynamically set the status of resources. You can use the functional status of checks from Prometheus Alarmmanager, Nagios or Sensu.

Visualization Layouts

Different data require different diagram visualization. Diagrams are symbolic representation of information according to some visualization technique. Every time you need to emphasise different qualities of displayed resources you can choose from several layouts to display the data.

Network Graph Layouts

For most of the cases we will be dealing with network data that do not have any single root or beginning.

Force-Directed Graph

Force-directed graph drawing algorithms are used for drawing graphs in an aesthetically pleasing way. Their purpose is to position the nodes of a graph in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space so that all the edges are of more or less equal length and there are as few crossing edges as possible, by assigning forces among the set of edges and the set of nodes, based on their relative positions, and then using these forces either to simulate the motion of the edges and nodes or to minimize their energy.

Force-directed plot of all OpenStack resources (cca 3000 resources)

Hive Plot

The hive plot is a visualization method for drawing networks. Nodes are mapped to and positioned on radially distributed linear axes — this mapping is based on network structural properties. Edges are drawn as curved links. Simple and interpretable.

Hive plot of all OpenStack resources (cca 3000 resources)

Arc Diagram

An arc diagram is a style of graph drawing, in which the vertices of a graph are placed along a line in the Euclidean plane, with edges being drawn as semicircles in one of the two halfplanes bounded by the line, or as smooth curves formed by sequences of semicircles. In some cases, line segments of the line itself are also allowed as edges, as long as they connect only vertices that are consecutive along the line.

Arc diagram of OpenStack project's resources (cca 100 resources)

Adjacency Matrix

An adjacency matrix is a square matrix used to represent a finite graph. The elements of the matrix indicate whether pairs of vertices are adjacent or not in the graph.

Adjacency matrix of OpenStack project's resources (cca 100 resources)

Hierarchical Edge Bundling

Danny Holten presents an awesome and aesthetically pleasing way of simplifying graphs and making tree graphs more accessible. What makes his project so useful, however, is how he outlines the particular thought process that goes into making a visualization.

Hierarchical edge bundling of SaltStack services (cca 100 resources)

Tree Graph Layouts

Directed graph traversal can give os acyclic structures suitable for showing parent-child relations in your subraphs.

Installation

Release version of infra-scraper is currently available on Pypi, to install it, simply execute:

pip install infra-scraper

To bootstrap latest development version into virtualenv, run following commands:

git clone git@github.com:cznewt/infra-scraper.git
cd infra-scraper
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
python setup.py install

Configuration

You provide one configuration file for all providers. The default location is /etc/infra-scraper/config.yaml but it can be overriden by INFRA_SCRAPER_CONFIG_PATH environmental variable, for example:

export INFRA_SCRAPER_CONFIG_PATH=~/scraper.yml

ETCD hosted configuration

You can use ETCD as a storage backend for the configuration and scrape results. Following environmental parameters need to be set:

export INFRA_SCRAPER_CONFIG_BACKEND=etcd
export INFRA_SCRAPER_CONFIG_PATH=/service/scraper/config

Storage configuration

The preffered scraping storage backend is neo4j service accessed by bolt interface.

storage:
  backend: neo4j
  database_url: 'bolt://neo4j:password@neo4j.host:7687'
endpoints: {}

You can set you local filesystem path where scraped data will be saved.

storage:
  backend: localfs
  storage_dir: /tmp/scraper
endpoints: {}

You can also set the scraping storage backend to use the ETCD service.

storage:
  backend: etcd
  storage_path: /scraper/data
endpoints: {}

Endpoints configuration

Each endpoint kind expects a little different set of configuration. Following samples show the required parameters to setup individual endpoints.

Amazon Web Services

AWS scraping uses boto3 high level AWS python SDK for accessing and manipulating AWS resources.

endpoints:
  aws-admin:
    kind: aws
    config:
      region: us-west-2
      aws_access_key_id: <access_key_id>
      aws_secret_access_key: <secret_access_key>

Kubernetes

Kubernetes requires some information from kubeconfig file. You provide the parameters of the cluster and the user to the scraper. These can be found under corresponding keys.

endpoints:
  k8s-admin:
    kind: kubernetes
    layouts:
    - force
    - hive
    config:
      cluster:
        server: https://kubernetes-api:443
        certificate-authority-data: |
          <ca-for-server-and-clients>
      user:
        client-certificate-data: |
          <client-cert-public>
        client-key-data: |
          <client-cert-private>

Note

Options config.cluster and config.user can be found in your kubeconfig file. Just copy the config fragment with cluster parameters and fragment with user parameter.

OpenStack

Configurations for keystone v2 and keystone v3 clouds. Config for single tenant scraping.

endpoints:
  os-v2-tenant:
    kind: openstack
    description: OpenStack (keystone v2) tenant
    scope: local
    layouts:
    - arc
    - force
    - hive
    - matrix
    config:
      region_name: RegionOne
      compute_api_version: '2.1'
      auth:
        username: user
        password: password
        project_name: project-name
        domain_name: 'default'
        auth_url: 'https://keystone-api:5000/v3'

Config for scraping resources from entire cloud.

endpoints:
  os-v2-admin:
    kind: openstack
    description: OpenStack (keystone v2) cloud
    scope: global
    layouts:
    - force
    - hive
    config:
      region_name: RegionOne
      auth:
        username: admin
        password: password
        project_name: admin
        auth_url:  https://keystone-api:5000/v2.0

SaltStack

Configuration for connecting to Salt API.

endpoints:
  salt-global:
    kind: salt
    layouts:
    - force
    - hive
    config:
      auth_url: 'http://127.0.0.1:8000'
      username: salt-user
      password: password

Terraform

Configuration for parsing terraform templates.

endpoints:
  tf-aws-app:
    kind: terraform
    layouts:
    - hive
    config:
      dir: ~/terraform/two-tier-aws

Usage

The application comes with several entry commands:

Scraping commands

scraper_get <endpoint-name>

Scrape single endpoint once.

scraper_get_forever <endpoint-name>

Scrape single endpoint continuously.

scraper_get_all

Scrape all defined endpoints once.

scraper_get_all_forever

Scrape all defined endpoints continuously.

UI and utility commands

scraper_status

Display the service status, endpoints, scrapes, etc.

scraper_web

Start the UI with visualization samples and API that provides the scraped data.

Example Platform Metadata

Following outputs show available resources and relations from given domain.

Kubernetes

kind: kubernetes
name: test-kubernetes
relations:
  k8s:deployment-k8s:namespace: 22
  k8s:deployment-k8s:replica_set: 62
  k8s:endpoint-k8s:namespace: 28
  k8s:event-k8s:namespace: 52
  k8s:persistent_volume_claim-k8s:namespace: 1
  k8s:pod-k8s:namespace: 52
  k8s:pod-k8s:node: 52
  k8s:pod-k8s:service: 52
  k8s:replica_set-k8s:namespace: 62
  k8s:replica_set-k8s:pod: 51
  k8s:replication_controller-k8s:namespace: 1
  k8s:secret-k8s:namespace: 1
  k8s:service-k8s:namespace: 30
  k8s:service_account-k8s:namespace: 1
resources:
  k8s:deployment: 22
  k8s:endpoint: 28
  k8s:event: 52
  k8s:namespace: 4
  k8s:node: 5
  k8s:persistent_volume: 1
  k8s:persistent_volume_claim: 1
  k8s:pod: 52
  k8s:replica_set: 62
  k8s:replication_controller: 1
  k8s:secret: 1
  k8s:service: 30
  k8s:service_account: 1
timestamp: 1508692477

OpenStack

kind: openstack
name: test-openstack
relations:
  os:floating_ip-os:project: 617
  os:hypervisor-os:aggregate: 46
  os:network-os:project: 575
  os:port-os:hypervisor: 3183
  os:port-os:network: 3183
  os:port-os:project: 3183
  os:port-os:server: 3183
  os:router-os:project: 42
  os:server-os:flavor: 676
  os:server-os:hypervisor: 676
  os:server-os:project: 676
  os:stack-os:network: 7
  os:stack-os:port: 17
  os:stack-os:project: 2
  os:stack-os:server: 7
  os:stack-os:subnet: 7
  os:subnet-os:network: 567
  os:subnet-os:project: 567
resources:
  os:aggregate: 13
  os:flavor: 43
  os:floating_ip: 617
  os:hypervisor: 72
  os:network: 575
  os:port: 3183
  os:resource_type: 169
  os:router: 42
  os:server: 676
  os:stack: 2
  os:subnet: 567
  os:volume: 10
timestamp: 1508694475

SaltStack

kind: salt
name: test-salt
relations:
  salt_job-salt_high_state: 552
  salt_job-salt_minion: 9
  salt_minion-salt_high_state: 689
  salt_service-salt_high_state: 689
  salt_service-salt_minion: 24
  salt_user-salt_job: 7
resources:
  salt_high_state: 689
  salt_job: 7
  salt_minion: 3
  salt_service: 24
  salt_user: 2
timestamp: 1508932328