Introduction

The croit Datacenter Manager (CDM) is one screen for all your storage clusters.

If you run more than one Ceph or croit cluster, you log into each one separately to answer simple questions: is everything healthy, how full are we, what changed last night, which disk is about to fail. CDM answers those questions once, for the whole fleet, and lets you jump into a single cluster when you want the detail.

CDM runs as one container next to your clusters. It reads them through their official API and never changes anything on a cluster. Adding CDM cannot break a running cluster, and it needs no agent installed anywhere.

What it gives you

The fleet at a glance. Total capacity and how much is used, read and write throughput, IOPS, servers and OSDs online, and how many of your clusters CDM can reach and how many need attention. A world map and a list beside it show every cluster with its state, the ones that need attention first, so a problem finds you instead of the other way round.

Aggregated numbers you can trust. A cluster that is unreachable never quietly contributes a zero. Every fleet total says how many clusters it covers, so a suspiciously low number explains itself. Reading the dashboard goes through what the numbers mean when a cluster cannot be read.

Capacity planning that is worth acting on. A fill history per cluster and, for every device class, a forecast of how many days remain until its fullest OSD reaches the near-full and full thresholds, so hardware gets ordered before it is urgent. Ceph fills to its fullest OSD, not to the average, so CDM also shows that OSD, and a threshold it has already crossed counts as due now. A forecast appears once a week of history exists; for a croit cluster CDM reads the last month from the cluster's own metrics when you add it.

Findings from every cluster in one list, most severe first: health warnings, recommendations, a disk whose SMART report went bad, an OSD that is down, a cluster CDM cannot reach, a croit release that has fallen behind the rest of the fleet. Mute one you have consciously accepted and it stops nagging.

Fleet-wide lists you can search and sort across all clusters at once: servers, services and gateways, OSDs, pools, physical disks with their SMART health, recent tasks, HA groups and S3 multisite replication. No more opening five tabs to find which host has the failing disk.

Logs from every cluster in one viewer. Follow them live, or walk an absolute time range. Select servers, OSDs, services or HA groups in their table and choose Logs, or pick one cluster in the page heading, and the viewer narrows to them.

Charts for one cluster or the whole fleet: IOPS, throughput, recovery, placement-group and OSD states summed, and latency, the IO and CPU load of every server, and per-OSD latency and balance, which is how you find the one slow disk dragging a pool down.

A world map with a marker per cluster, coloured by health. Useful when clusters sit in different data centres, countries or customers.

One audit trail covering what happened in CDM and on the clusters, so "who changed that" has a single answer.

Single sign-on, and read-only by default. CDM has no user accounts of its own. Your existing logins and groups keep working, and anyone who can log in gets read-only access unless you grant them more.

Which clusters can I connect?

croit clusters from v2604 onwards are fully supported and get every feature above.

Plain Ceph clusters connect through the Ceph Manager dashboard API. You get health, capacity, throughput, servers, services, OSDs, pools, running tasks, gateways, the cluster log, the audit trail, Ceph's own health checks and alerts, and the Ceph dashboard through Open UI. Some things are not available for them: CDM does not read their disk inventory or SMART health yet, there are no charts, because the Ceph API serves no time series, and there are no HA groups, S3 multisite or task history. The cluster log refreshes as a snapshot instead of streaming live, and cannot be narrowed to one host or walked back in time. The capacity trend still works, because CDM records that itself, starting when you add the cluster. There is no near-full or full forecast, because CDM does not read Ceph's fullness thresholds.

CDM tells you in plain words when a feature is unavailable and why, instead of showing an empty page. When you add a cluster, Detect from URL works out its type, so you do not have to know.

Where to go next

• Installation covers what you need and how to start the container.
• First Steps walks through the first login and adding your clusters.