After an intensive 9 month development cycle, the Ceph project is happy to announce their next stable release: Ceph 13.2.0 “Mimic” is the first version of Ceph that has been published under the revised release schedule in which a new stable release is published every nine months. Previously, Ceph releases were made available in a six-month cycle, where only every second release was declared “stable” and received bug fixes for a longer period.
As usual, Ceph Mimic comes with a long list of enhancements and improvements as well as several new features. Please consult the release notes for an exhaustive list!
Having worked on this project with my team pretty much full-time for the past six months, it’s probably not surprising that my personal highlight of the Mimic release is the new Ceph Manager Dashboard, aka “Dashboard v2”.
Implemented as a Ceph Manager module, it is a “plug-in” replacement of the one that shipped with Ceph Luminous and is an ongoing project to add a full-featured, native web based monitoring and administration application to the upstream Ceph project. The development of this new dashboard is actively driven by the team that developed the open source openATTIC Ceph management and monitoring tool at SUSE.
The architecture and functionality of this module is derived from and inspired by openATTIC, merging both functionality from the original dashboard as well as adding new functionality originally developed for the standalone version of openATTIC.
The WebUI implementation is based on Angular/TypeScript, the dashboard module’s backend code uses the CherryPy Python framework and a custom REST API implementation. Take a look at the openATTIC blog for additional background information about the evolution of this project.
As part of the initial Mimic release, it currently provides the following features to monitor and manage various aspects of your Ceph cluster:
Getting started with the dashboard is simple. When installing Ceph from the RPM or DEB installation packages, the package management system should have already taken care of installing the required dependencies (e.g. Python modules). The dashboard can be enabled on any node that runs an instance of the Ceph manager daemon. Check the documentation for details on how to enable and configure the dashboard.
Looking back, I’m quite impressed about what the team has accomplished in the extremely short time window that we had for pulling this off. But we’re far from done yet – among other things, we’d like to add the missing features that will get the dashboard on par with features provided by openATTIC, to provide a migration path for existing users. As some of this functionality depends on interacting with external instrumentation frameworks, it will likely take some more time to find a generic approach.
We have a number of additional features that we will add to the Mimic branch for later releases. As of today, we’re currently working on the following features:
If you’re going to deploy a Ceph Mimic cluster in your environment, please give the new dashboard a try and let us know what you think! We’re especially interested in learning more about features you are missing, how to improve the existing functionality or the usability and user experience in general. If you have anything to share, please get in touch using any of the established communication methods. In addition to that, the team working on the dashboard can also be reached on the #ceph-dashboard IRC channel on OFTC. We look forward to your feedback, bug reports and ideas!
If you would like to get involved in the dashboard development, please see the HACKING.rst file in the source tree for details on how to work on the code base.