Ceph AIops

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.

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

As a Claude Code plugin

One install gives an agent both the skill and the MCP server:

/plugin marketplace add AIops-tools/marketplace
/plugin install ceph-aiops@aiops-tools

The MCP server is fetched with uv and pinned to the package version this plugin declares, so an audit row can be traced back to the code that wrote it. Credentials are still configured with ceph-aiops init — see below.

As an OpenClaw plugin

The same bundle is published on ClawHub, where one install delivers the skill and its MCP server together:

openclaw plugins install clawhub:@zw008/ceph-aiops
openclaw skills info ceph-aiops          # expect: Visible to model: yes

Restart the OpenClaw gateway afterwards so it loads the plugin. The MCP server is fetched with uv, pinned to this exact release, so uvx has to be on PATH — without it the skill still installs but reports Visible to model: no. Credentials are configured exactly as below.

As a CLI or standalone MCP server

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

Where that password then lives: an exported variable is readable by every process this shell starts and is recorded by shell history. On a shared or long-lived host, prefer the interactive prompt, or inject it from a secret manager for the life of the one command that needs it.

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.