Ceph AIops

Disclaimer: Community-maintained open-source project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Ceph project or any storage vendor. Product and trademark names belong to their owners. MIT licensed.

Governed AI-ops for Ceph — talks to a vanilla ceph-mgr Dashboard REST API (HTTPS :8443, username + password exchanged for a short-lived JWT at POST /api/auth) with a built-in governance harness: unified audit log, token/runaway budget guard, undo-token recording, and descriptive risk tiers. Works against stock ceph-mgr — cephadm, hypervisor-bundled Ceph, or MicroCeph — with no croit and no Kubernetes dependency. Self-contained: no external skill-family dependency.

What it does

The flagship analysis, plus the guarded reads and writes around it:

• cluster_health — HEALTH_WARN/ERR root-cause analysis. Instead of echoing raw check codes (PG_DEGRADED, OSD_NEARFULL, SLOW_OPS, MON_DOWN, LARGE_OMAP_OBJECTS, …), it turns each active check into plain language: what it means, the likely cause, and the suggested next action. This is the differentiator vs the hobby Ceph MCPs that just proxy ceph -s.

• Governed destructive ops. The operations operators actually fear — osd_purge, pool_delete, set_pool_size, rbd_image_delete — carry dry-run + double-confirm and a high risk tier; reversible tuning (osd_reweight, throttle_recovery, cluster_flag_set, pool quota/pg_num/ autoscale) records an undo descriptor capturing the prior state.

Related MCP server: OpenShift SRE Copilot

What this tool does, and does not, decide

It delivers Ceph operations — reads and writes — accurately and efficiently, and records every one of them. It does not decide whether a write is allowed to happen. That is the agent's judgement, or the permission of the account you connect it with: give it a ceph-mgr Dashboard account with a read-only role and the writes fail at the mgr — the place that actually owns the permission.

So there is no read-only switch, no policy file, no approval gate to configure. The one thing the tool guarantees is that nothing is silent: every call, over MCP and over the CLI alike, lands an audit row in ~/.ceph-aiops/audit.db, and destructive writes still capture their before-state and record an inverse where one exists.

Each tool declares a risk_level, kept in agreement with its [READ]/[WRITE] documentation tag by a test, and carried into the audit row as a descriptive tier — so a reviewer can see at a glance that a row was a high-risk delete. It is a label, not a gate.

What works

• CLI (ceph-aiops ...): init, overview, health detail/health status, osd tree/df/reweight/out/purge, secret set/list/rm/migrate/rotate-password, doctor, mcp. osd out and osd purge require --dry-run + double confirm.

• MCP server (ceph-aiops mcp or ceph-aiops-mcp): the full 37 tools (17 read, 18 write, 2 undo), every one wrapped with the bundled @governed_tool harness. The CLI is a convenience subset; the MCP surface is the whole tool.

• Encrypted credentials: the Dashboard password lives in an encrypted store ~/.ceph-aiops/secrets.enc (Fernet + scrypt) — never plaintext on disk. Unlock with a master password from CEPH_AIOPS_MASTER_PASSWORD (MCP/CI) or an interactive prompt (CLI).

• Reversibility: reversible writes capture the prior state and record an inverse undo descriptor (e.g. osd_reweight → prior weight, set_pool_quota → prior quota, throttle_recovery → prior backfill/recovery settings).

• Safety: destructive ops (osd_purge, osd_mark_out, pool_delete, set_pool_size, rbd_image_delete, rbd_snapshot_delete) are high risk with dry_run and CLI double confirmation.

Capability matrix (37 MCP tools)

Totals: 37 tools — 17 read, 18 write, 2 undo.

Quick start

uv tool install ceph-aiops          # or: pipx install ceph-aiops
ceph-aiops init                     # wizard: add a mgr target + store the Dashboard password (encrypted)
ceph-aiops doctor                   # JWT login + mgr-dashboard reachability
ceph-aiops overview                 # HEALTH status + active checks + OSD up/in
ceph-aiops health detail            # decode the active HEALTH_WARN/ERR checks (RCA)
ceph-aiops osd df                   # per-OSD utilization, most-full first, near/backfill-full flags

Run as an MCP server (stdio):

export CEPH_AIOPS_MASTER_PASSWORD=...   # unlock secrets non-interactively
ceph-aiops-mcp

Governance

Every operation — MCP and CLI — passes through the bundled @governed_tool harness. It records; it does not authorize (see above).

• Audit — every call (params, result, status, duration, risk tier, and any operator-supplied approver/rationale) is logged to ~/.ceph-aiops/audit.db (relocatable via CEPH_AIOPS_HOME). The CLI writes the same row the MCP path does — there is no unaudited entry point.

• Runaway guard — a safety backstop, not an authorization gate: the same call hammered in a tight loop trips a circuit breaker so a stuck agent can't burn unbounded calls/time. Disable with CEPH_RUNAWAY_MAX=0; optional hard ceilings via CEPH_MAX_TOOL_CALLS / CEPH_MAX_TOOL_SECONDS.

• Undo recording — reversible writes record an inverse descriptor built from the fetched before-state.

• Risk tier — a descriptive label on the audit row derived from risk_level; it gates nothing.

Supported scope & limitations

• Deployments: vanilla ceph-mgr with the dashboard module enabled — cephadm, hypervisor-bundled Ceph, or MicroCeph. No croit, no Kubernetes dependency.

• Ceph has no ETag / pagination on the Dashboard API, so this tool exposes none — nothing is missing, the upstream API simply doesn't offer them.

• Validation status: behaviour is exercised against mocked Dashboard responses by the test suite; multi-node rebalance and the write ops have not been run against a live cluster. The cheapest live check is a single-node MicroCeph (snap install microceph → bootstrap → loop-file OSDs) running ceph-aiops doctor; a 3-node Vagrant cluster exercises real rebalance behaviour. See docs/VERIFICATION.md for the full live-verification checklist.

Missing a capability?

RGW multisite, per-daemon config sprawl, NFS-Ganesha exports, orchestrator (cephadm) host management — not here yet. Open an issue or send a PR — feedback and contributions are welcome.