Rackspace Metrics Overview

Rackspace Metrics is a multitenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that offers a flexible and affordable platform for storing and serving time-series metrics. It provides a REST API for metrics ingestion and retrieval. In addition, it also provides out-of-box integration with
popular open-source tools. The software that powers this service is an open-source project named Blueflood, which is built on top of Apache® Cassandra®. Rackspace Metrics is designed to meet the functional and performance requirements of enterprise-scale metrics.

The growth of metrics

The number of applications that are built for and deployed in the cloud is growing. Instead of a monolithic design, these applications have distributed architectures and are deployed as clusters of platform components. These components constantly communicate with each other to form the business functions of the application.

In distributed architectures, each platform component instance is an independent process that can be monitored individually. As a result, the size of the data collected by infrastructure-monitoring tools such as Rackspace Monitoring and Nagios® has grown exponentially.

Rackspace Metrics focuses on changing the cost structure of metrics collection by replacing the storage component. Metrics storage is challenging to manage because it continually grows in size and performance requirements. Rackspace Metrics meets this challenge by aligning with popular open-source tools for collecting and visualizing data. Users get the same experience with a familiar toolset, without the hassle of managing the metrics storage.

Rackspace Metrics components

Rackspace Metrics consists of the following components:

• Metrics ingestion: Rackspace Metrics enables you to ingest metrics through the Ingestion API. Rackspace Metrics is integrated with popular open-source metrics collection systems such as StatsD, collectd, and Logstash.

  You can start using Rackspace Metrics by changing only a few lines of the configuration in your existing metrics collection system. You can also choose to leave your existing metrics storage engine running for a while to compare the results against Rackspace Metrics.

  The Metrics Ingestion API is currently in the Early Access program.

• Metrics query: Rackspace Metrics enables you to retrieve metrics data via a public API. Through its Query API, Rackspace Metrics supports metrics visualization in the Rackspace Cloud
  Control Panel and Rackspace Intelligence for data collected through Rackspace Monitoring. In addition, Rackspace Metrics can also integrate with Graphite and Grafana®. For more information, see Create a Grafana dashboard for Rackspace Metrics.

  The Rackspace Metrics Query API is currently in Limited Availability.

Grant users access to Rackspace Metrics

You don't need to register to access data in Rackspace Metrics that has been collected through Rackspace Monitoring. The data is already available to users through the Query API. However, you must have the appropriate role to access data through the Query API.

To obtain access to the Rackspace Metrics Ingestion API, sign up through the Early Access
program.

Add appropriate roles

Rackspace Metrics is not available in the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel. When you sign up for the Early Access program, Rackspace Metrics-related roles are added to your users automatically. If you see permission-related issues in testing,
contact us at [email protected].

Note: For information on the roles that may access the Rackspace Metrics API, see Role-based access control (RBAC). For more information about role-based access control, see Learn about Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

Access Rackspace Metrics

You can access Rackspace Metrics through simple REST API endpoints. The following list provides some examples of tools that can send HTTP requests and capture the output:

• cURL: A command-line tool.
• Chrome Advanced REST Client: A REST client.

Find more information

For more information about Rackspace Metrics, such as access endpoints, how to determine your tenant ID and retrieve authentication tokens, and supported request options, see the Rackspace Metrics getting started guide
and the Rackspace Metrics general API information.

Get help and provide feedback

During the Early Access program, support for Rackspace Metrics is available by email only during regular business hours. If you have further questions or suggestions, contact us at [email protected].