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Overview

Monitoring the load balancing infrastructure ensures production traffic is not impacted by appliance degradation, certificate expiry, or capacity saturation. This guide covers appliance health checks, traffic statistics, and manual failover procedures.
Administrator Access Required — This operation requires the admin role. Contact your Xloud administrator if you do not have sufficient permissions.

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Appliance Health

List all appliances with health status
openstack loadbalancer amphora list
Key status fields to monitor:
FieldHealthy ValueDescription
statusALLOCATEDAppliance is assigned to a load balancer
lb_network_ipNon-emptyManagement plane connectivity established
cert_expirationFuture dateAppliance TLS certificate validity
compute_idNon-emptyBacking compute instance exists
Show detailed appliance information
openstack loadbalancer amphora show <amphora-id>

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Traffic Statistics

Show load balancer statistics
openstack loadbalancer stats show <lb-name>
StatisticDescription
active_connectionsCurrent open connections to the load balancer
bytes_inTotal bytes received from clients
bytes_outTotal bytes sent to clients
request_errorsFailed requests — useful for detecting upstream issues
total_connectionsLifetime connection count

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Certificate Expiration Monitoring

Appliances use TLS certificates for controller-to-appliance management communication. Monitor expiration to prevent management plane failures:
Check certificate expiration on all appliances
openstack loadbalancer amphora list \
  -c id -c cert_expiration -c status \
  --sort-column cert_expiration
Appliances with expired certificates cannot receive configuration updates from the controller. If an appliance certificate expires, trigger a failover to rotate the certificate:
Rotate appliance certificate via failover
openstack loadbalancer amphora failover <amphora-id>

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Manual Failover

Trigger a manual failover to replace a degraded or expired appliance:
Failover an appliance
openstack loadbalancer amphora failover <amphora-id>
Failover causes brief service interruption (typically under 30 seconds for ACTIVE_STANDBY topologies) while the replacement appliance is provisioned and configuration is replicated.
Monitor failover progress:
Monitor load balancer provisioning status during failover
watch -n 5 "openstack loadbalancer show <lb-name> -c provisioning_status"

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Prometheus Integration

Xloud Load Balancer exposes metrics via the Octavia Prometheus exporter when configured. Key metrics to alert on:
MetricAlert ThresholdDescription
octavia_loadbalancer_status!= 1Load balancer not ACTIVE
octavia_member_status!= 1Member not ONLINE
octavia_amphora_cert_expiry_days< 30Appliance certificate expiring soon

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Next Steps

Security

Configure TLS certificate lifecycle management and management plane access controls.

Admin Troubleshooting

Use monitoring data to diagnose and resolve platform-level failures.

Flavor Profiles

Upgrade appliance capacity when statistics show saturation.

Architecture

Understand the relationship between appliances and the management plane.