Searchlight Plugin Documentation

The search service determines the types of information that is searchable via a plugin mechanism.

Installing Plugins

Plugins must be registered in setup.cfg.

Within setup.cfg the setting within [entry_points] named searchlight.index_backend should list the plugin for each available indexable type. After making a change, it’s necessary to re-install the python package (for instance with pip install -e .).

Each plugin registered in setup.cfg is enabled by default. Typically it should only be necessary to modify setup.cfg if you are installing a new plugin. It is not necessary to modify [entry_points] to temporarily enable or disable installed plugins. Once they are installed, they can be disabled, enabled and configured in the searchlight.conf file.

Configuring Plugins

After installation, plugins are configured in searchlight.conf.

Note

After making changes to searchlight.conf you must perform the actions indicated in the tables below.

  1. Restart services: Restart all running searchlight-api and searchlight-listener processes.
  2. Re-index affected types: You will need to re-index any resource types affected by the change. (See Searchlight Indexing).

Note

Unless you are changing to a non-default value, you do not need to specify any of the following configuration options.

End to End Configuration Example

The following shows a sampling of various configuration options in searchlight.conf. These are NOT necessarily recommended or default configuration values. They are intended for exemplary purposes only. Please read the rest of the guide for detailed information.:

[listener]
notifications_pool = searchlight

[resource_plugin]
resource_group_name = searchlight
# include_region_name = True

[service_credentials:nova]
compute_api_version = 2.1

[resource_plugin:os_nova_server]
enabled = True
admin_only_fields = OS-EXT-SRV*,OS-EXT-STS:vm_state

[resource_plugin:os_nova_hypervisor]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_nova_flavor]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_nova_servergroup]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_glance_image]
enabled = True
# override_region_name = Region1,Region2

[resource_plugin:os_glance_metadef]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_cinder_volume]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_cinder_snapshot]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_neutron_net]
enabled = True
admin_only_fields=admin_state_up,status

[resource_plugin:os_neutron_port]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_neutron_security_group]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_designate_zone]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_designate_recordset]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_swift_account]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_swift_container]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_swift_object]
enabled = False

Common Plugin Configuration Options

There are common configuration options that all plugins honor. They are split between global, inheritable and non-inheritable options.

Global plugin configuration options apply to all plugins and cannot be overridden by an individual plugin.

Inheritable common configuration options may be specified in a default configuration group of [resource_plugin] in searchlight.conf and optionally overridden in a specific plugin’s configuration. For example:

[resource_plugin]
resource_group_name = searchlight

[resource_plugin:os_nova_server]
resource_group_name = searchlight-nova-servers

Non-Inheritable common configuration options are honored by all plugins, but must be specified directly in that plugin’s configuration group. They are not inherited from the [resource_plugin] configuration group. For example:

[resource_plugin:os_glance_image]
enabled = false

Notifications

There are two ways to configure services to send notifications that Searchlight can receive. The recommended method is to configure Searchlight to use the notification topic that each service is already configured to use and then to allow Searchlight to consume messages from that topic using a pool, touched on in the messaging documentation. Searchlight uses this configuration by default.

Topics

Searchlight defaults to using the oslo notification topic of notifications. This is the oslo default topic which most services also use to broadcast their notifications. You will need to change the topic in both searchlight.conf and the various service configuration files if you want to modify the topic used by Searchlight. Each plugin can use a different topic.

Notification topics are a special case. It is possible to override the notification topic as a shared setting; it is also possible to override <topic>,<exchange> pairs per-plugin in the case where some services are using different topics. For instance, in a setup where (for example) neutron is using a separate notification topic:

[resource_plugin]
notifications_topic = searchlight_indexer

[resource_plugin:os_nova_server]
notifications_topics_exchanges = searchlight_indexer,nova
notifications_topics_exchanges = another-topic,neutron

If you override one service topic, you must provide topic,exchange pairs for all service notifications a plugin supports.

Pools

In addition, Searchlight uses a notification pool. This allows Searchlight to listen on the same topic to which other services are listening while ensuring that Searchlight still gets its own copy of each notification. The default notification pool is set to searchlight. This is set using the notifications_pool setting in the [listener] configuration group. Example:

[listener]
notification_pools = searchlight

See Individual Plugin Configuration for more information and examples on individual plugin configuration.

Publishers

Searchlight supports configuration of publishers which push enriched notification info to other external systems. To use this feature, you must first register publishers in setup.cfg. This is similar to Installing Plugins action. Within setup.cfg the setting within [entry_points] named searchlight.publishers should list publishers for plugins to use. Don’t forget to re-install the python package(pip install -e) if you have made changes to publisher entry points. Example:

[entry_points]
searchlight.publisher =
    log_publisher = searchlight.publisher.log.LogPublisher

Publishers can be specified in a default configuration group of [resource_plugin] in searchlight.conf or overridden in a specific plugin’s configuration. Example:

[resource_plugin]
publishers = log_publisher

Currently publishers only work for incremental updates. Bulk api updates are not supported.

Global Configuration Options
Option Default value Description Action(s) Required
resource_group_name searchlight Determines the ElasticSearch index and alias where documents will be stored. Index names will be suffixed with a timestamp. Group name must consist of only lowercase alphanumeric characters and underscores. The first character cannot be an underscore.
Restart services
Re-index all types
include_region_name   Defined for all plugins. Controls whether or not to include region_name as a mapping field and in each document. Defaults to off.
Restart services
Reindex all

Note

Sorting on fields across resource types(plugins), with each plugin specifying a different resource group name will cause errors if sort-by fields are not defined in each resource type. See Sorting across resource groups for more information on how to sort across different resource groups

Inheritable Common Configuration Options
Option Default value Description Action(s) Required
mapping_use_
doc_values
 true Use doc_values to store documents rather than fieldata. doc_values has some advantages, particularly around memory usage.
Full re-index
notifications_topic notifications The oslo.messaging topic on which services send notifications. Each plugin defines a list of exchanges to which it will subscribe. Restart listener
publishers   Plugin can have multiple publishers seperated by commas. Each publisher will receive enriched notifications once plugin subscribed events come. Restart listener
Non-Inheritable Common Configuration Options
Option Default value Description Action(s) Required
enabled true An installed plugin may be enabled (true) or disabled (false). When disabled, it will not be available for bulk indexing, notification listening, or searching.
Restart services
Re-index affected types
admin_only_fields <none> A comma separated list of fields (wildcards allowed) that are only visible to administrators, and only searchable by administrators. Non- administrative users will not be able to see or search on these fields. These fields are typically specified for search performance, search accuracy, or security reasons. or security reasons. If a plugin has a hard-coded mapping for a specific field, it will take precedence over this configuration option.
Restart services
Re-index affected types
notifications_
topics_exchanges
 <none> Override topic,exchange pairs (see note above). Use when services output notifications on dissimilar topics.
Restart services
override_region_name <none> Specifies a region_name to be used instead of one configured in service_credentials.os_region_name. Useful for multi-region deployments where a service is shared between regions. E.g. RegionOne,RegionTwo
Restart services

Individual Plugin Configuration

Individual plugins may also be configured in searchlight.conf.

Note

Plugin configurations are typically named based on their resource type. The configuration name uses the following naming pattern:

  • The resource type name changed to all lower case
  • All :: (colons) converted into _ (underscores).

For example: OS::Glance::Image –> [resource_plugin:os_glance_image]

To override a default configuration option on a specific plugin, you must specify a configuration group for that plugin with the option(s) that you want to override. For example, if you wanted to just disable the Glance image plugin, you would add the following configuration group:

[resource_plugin:os_glance_image]
enabled = false

Each plugin may have additional configuration options specific to it. Information about those configuration options will be found in documentation for that plugin.

Finally, each integrated service (Glance, Nova, etc) may require additional configuration settings. For example, typically, you will need to add the searchlight_indexer notification topic to each service’s configuration in order for Searchlight to receive incremental updates from that service.

Note

In Newton, notification messaging pools will become the default recommended configuration, which does not require changing any service configurations beyond enabling notifications.

To enable the use of notification pools instead of a separate topic, add the notifications_pool option in the listener section of searchlight.conf. There is no need in this case to add an additional topic. Messages will begin to be delivered to the pool after searchlight-listener has started.

Please review each plugin’s documentation for more information: