CloudKitty - Rating service guide

Overview

CloudKitty is the Openstack service used to rate your platform usage. As a rating service, CloudKitty does not provide billing services such as generating a bill to send to your customers every month.

However, it provides you the building bricks you can use to build your own billing service upon internally.

Because cloudkitty is a flexible rating service, it’s highly customizable while still offering a generic approach to the rating of your platform.

It lets you choose which metrics you want to rate, from which datasource and where to finally store the processed rate of those resources.

This document will explain how to use the different features available and that Kolla Ansible supports.

See the CloudKitty documentation for further information.

CloudKitty Collector backend

CloudKitty natively supports multiple collector backends.

By default Kolla Ansible uses the Gnocchi backend, however we also support using the following backend types:

• prometheus - Use Prometheus metrics as dataset for cloudkitty to process.

• monasca - Use Openstack Monasca metrics as dataset for cloudkitty to process.

The configuration parameter related to this option is cloudkitty_collector_backend.

To use the Prometheus collector backend:

cloudkitty_collector_backend: prometheus

Alternatively, to use the Monasca collector backend:

cloudkitty_collector_backend: monasca

Cloudkitty Storage Backend

As for collectors, CloudKitty supports multiple backend to store ratings. By default, Kolla Ansible uses the InfluxDB based backend.

Another famous alternative is Elasticsearch and can be activated in Kolla Ansible using the cloudkitty_storage_backend configuration option in your globals.yml configuration file:

cloudkitty_storage_backend: elasticsearch

You can only use one backend type at a time, selecting elasticsearch will automatically enable Elasticsearch deployment and creation of the required CloudKitty index.