Skip to content

Monitoring Cells with Prometheus & Grafana

This tutorial quickly introduce how to set up and run Prometheus and Grafana to gather and display metrics for your Pydio Cells instance.

Please note that it is an Enterprise Distribution only feature.

Enabling metrics

The backend code is instrumented with gauges and counters. We use an interface for various metrics systems (uber-go/tally), using a no-op implementation by default.

Using the --enable_metrics flag upon startup registers a Prometheus compatible collector instead of the no-op implementation, and achieve three things:

  • Expose metrics as HTTP on a random port under the /metrics endpoint on each Cells process (only one per process, not per service)
  • Gather info about these exposed endpoints for all processes via the registry and thus list all these endpoints as Prometheus compatible targets.
  • Dynamically update a JSON file under <cells root dir>/services/pydio.grpc.metrics/prom_clients.json. This file is watched by Prometheus so that the endpoints can be dynamically discovered (see below).

In a distributed mode, you must run Prometheus on the same node where pydio.gateway.metrics is running.

Installation

You can download Prometheus and Grafana binaries for your platform or install them using Docker. Remember that you must install them on the same node where the pydio.gateway.metrics service is running.

Setup

Prometheus

Edit prometheus.yml to add a new job in the scrape_config section, using the embeded file_sd_configs Prometheus discovery mechanism. This tool allows Prometheus to watch for a specific JSon (or YAML) file and thus know where to load scraping targets.

YAML section should look like (the first job is set by default by Prometheus to monitor itself):

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
scrape_configs:
  # The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
  - job_name: 'prometheus'

    # metrics_path defaults to '/metrics'
    # scheme defaults to 'http'.

    static_configs:
    - targets: ['localhost:9090']

  - job_name: 'cells'

    file_sd_configs:
      - files:
        - {PATH_TO_CELLS_CONFIG_FOLDER}/services/pydio.gateway.metrics/prom_clients.json

You can configure Prometheus to start on the port you wish, default is 9090.

With Cells ED running, you can check that all processes are correctly detected by visiting http://localhost:9090/targets.

Grafana

First Start Grafana. By default, it is accessible at port 3000. You define your own specific port using the GF_SERVER_HTTP_PORT environement variable.

Choose an admin/password and perform basic install steps.

Add a Prometheus DataSource in Grafana pointing to the Prometheus port defined in the previous step.

The Grafana Dashboard

A simple dashboard has been published on the Grafana website.
It can be simply imported with the Graphana UI by following steps:

  • In the left menu, select Dashboard > Import
  • In the "Grafana.com Dashboard" text field, enter the dashboard ID 9817

The new dashboard should be available and show something like the image below.