Overview and concepts¶

OpenWatch is a FinOps tool for sovereign European clouds built on OpenStack. It reads your usage and rating data, then turns it into a live cost dashboard, waste detection, right-sizing advice, budget alerts and cost allocation by tag.

This page explains the handful of concepts you need before you start.

Read-first by design¶

OpenWatch reads your cloud data (inventory, usage and rating) to build every dashboard, and it never changes anything on its own. A few optimisation features can optionally act on your cloud, but only when you explicitly trigger and confirm them: deleting an orphan resource, or applying and reverting a rightsizing resize or volume retype. Your OpenStack password is encrypted at rest and used only to call the provider APIs.

If you connect OpenWatch with read-only credentials, everything except those optional actions works exactly the same. See Connect your cloud for how to scope the credentials.

Core concepts¶

Organisation¶

An organisation is your tenant in OpenWatch. It owns everything else: connected cloud projects, members, notification channels, alerts and (on the SaaS) the subscription. When you sign up, you create your first organisation through a short onboarding wizard.

You can belong to more than one organisation. The organisation you are currently looking at is the active organisation, shown in the top navigation; switching it changes every screen at once.

Project¶

A project is one OpenStack project (also called a tenancy) that you connect to OpenWatch. Costs, resources and usage are always scoped to the projects in your active organisation. You can connect several projects and view them individually or aggregated.

See Connect your cloud to add your first project.

Members and roles¶

An organisation has members. Roles control what a member can do (for example, an administrator can manage members and projects, while other members consume the dashboards). Member and project counts are subject to your plan limits.

Managing members and projects is covered in Members and projects.

Regions¶

Infomaniak Public Cloud exposes two regions, dc3-a and dc4-a. OpenWatch queries both so your figures are complete, then lets you filter the dashboard to all regions or a single one.

Plans and editions¶

The feature set is the same across editions; what differs is the plan limits (number of projects, members and which advanced features are unlocked). At a glance:

• Community: free, self-hosted, locked to the essential plan.
• Enterprise: self-hosted with a licence key that unlocks higher limits.
• SaaS: hosted on openwatch.cloud, limits follow your subscription.

Full details are in Editions and plan limits.

How your data flows¶

1. You connect a project with your OpenStack credentials (read access is enough for the dashboards).
2. A background job queries the provider APIs (Nova, Cinder, Neutron, Glance, Octavia and the CloudKitty rating API) and stores the result in a cache.
3. The dashboard reads from that cache, so pages load instantly and never block on a live API call.
4. The cache is refreshed automatically on a schedule, and you can trigger a refresh manually.

Where to go next¶

• Create your account
• Connect your cloud
• Cost dashboard