prometheus

A Nutanix / Prometheus exporter in bash

Posted on by gary

Overview

For a fun afternoon project, how about a retro prometheus exporter using Apache/nginx, cgi-bin and bash!?

About prometheus format

A Prometheus exporter simply has to return a page with metric names and metric values in a particular format like below.

ntnx_bash{metric="cluster_read_iops"} 0
ntnx_bash{metric="cluster_write_iops"} 1

When you configure prometheus via prometheus.yml you’re telling prometheus to visit a particular IP:Port over HTTP and ask for a page called metrics – so if the “page” called metrics is a script – the script just has to return (print) out data in the expected format – and prometheus will accept that as a basic “exporter”. The idea here is to write a very simple exporter in bash that connects to a Nutanix cluster – hits the stats API and returns IOPS data for a given container in the correct format.

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Viewing Nutanix cluster metrics in prometheus/grafana

Posted on by gary

Using Nutanix API with prometheus push-gateway.

Many customers would like to view their cluster metrics alongside existing performance data using Prometheus/Grafana

Currently Nutanix does not provide a native exporter for Prometheus to use as a datasource. However we can use the prometheus push-gateway and a simple script which pulls from the native APIs to get data into prometheus. From there we can use Grafana or anything that can connect to Prometheus.

The goal is to be able to view cluster metrics alongside other Grafana dashboards. For example show the current Read/Write IOPS that the cluster is delivering on a per container basis. I’m hard-coding IPs and username/passwords in the script which obviously is not production grade, so don’t do that.

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How to monitor SQLServer on Windows with Prometheus

Posted on by gary

TL;DR

  • Enable SQLServer agent in SSMS
  • Install the Prometheus Windows exporter from github the installer is in the Assets section near the bottom of the page
  • Install Prometheus scraper/database to your monitoring server/laptop via the appropriate installer
  • Point a browser to the prometheus server e.g. :9090
    • Add a new target, which will be the Windows exporter installed in step.
    • It will be something like <SQLSERVERIP>:9182/metrics
    • Ensure the Target shows “Green”
  • Check that we can scrape SQLserver tranactions. In the search/execute box enter something like this
    rate(windows_mssql_sqlstats_batch_requests[30s])*60
  • Put the SQLserver under load with something like HammerDB
  • Hit Execute on the Prometheus server search box and you should see a transaction rate similar to HammerDB
  • Install Grafana and Point it to the Prometheus server (See multiple examples of how to do this)
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Quick & Dirty Prometheus on OS-X

Posted on by gary

How to install Prometheus on OS-X

Install prometheus

  • Download the compiled prometheus binaries from prometheus.io
  • Unzip the binary and cd into the directory.
  • Run the prometheus binary, from the command line, it will listen on port 9090
$ cd /Users/gary.little/Downloads/prometheus-2.16.0-rc.0.darwin-amd64
$ ./prometheus
  • From a local browser, point to localhost:9090
prometheus web-ui

Add a collector/scraper to monitor the OS

Prometheus itself does not do much apart from monitor itself, to do anything useful we have to add a scraper/exporter module. The easiest thing to do is add the scraper to monitor OS-X itself. As in Linux the OS exporter is simply called “node exporter”.

Start by downloading the pre-compiled darwin node exporter from prometheus.io

  • Unzip the tar.gz
  • cd into the directory
  • run the node exporter
$ cd /Users/gary.little/Downloads/node_exporter-0.18.1.darwin-amd64
$ ./node_exporter
 INFO[0000] Starting node_exporter (version=0.18.1, branch=HEAD, revision=3db77732e925c08f675d7404a8c46466b2ece83e)  source="node_exporter.go:156"
 INFO[0000] Build context (go=go1.11.10, user=root@4a30727bb68c, date=20190604-16:47:36)  source="node_exporter.go:157"
 INFO[0000] Enabled collectors:                           source="node_exporter.go:97"
 INFO[0000]  - boottime                                   source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - cpu                                        source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - diskstats                                  source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - filesystem                                 source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - loadavg                                    source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - meminfo                                    source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - netdev                                     source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - textfile                                   source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000]  - time                                       source="node_exporter.go:104"
 INFO[0000] Listening on :9100                            source="node_exporter.go:170""
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