OpenStack Summit May 2015 Vancouver

Performance monitoring and troubleshooting of cloud based object storage is as much an art as science. Although there are a plethora of open source monitoring tools which gather system metrics, the real challenge is how to utilize them to find the root cause of a problem.

In this presentation we present a general, open source based, step-by-step methodology to understand performance bottlenecks in a Swift system.  Our approach uses standard tools including logstash, collectd, statsd, elasticsearch, kibana and graphite.  We also describe an additional simple Swift middleware we developed to help gain further insights.  Finally, we demonstrate results obtained from our approach used in an internal deployment of Swift.