HamzaMohibe.github.io

Monitoring Overview

Effective monitoring is essential for identifying issues, analyzing performance, and maintaining the overall health of our application. Prometheus and Grafana work together to provide a comprehensive monitoring solution.

Prometheus

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability. It is particularly well-suited for dynamic environments like cloud infrastructure.

How Prometheus Works

Prometheus follows a pull-based model, where it scrapes metrics from various targets at regular intervals. These targets could be your application instances, databases, or any other services. Prometheus stores these metrics in a time-series database, allowing for querying and analysis.

Prometheus Configuration

The configuration of Prometheus is defined in a YAML file (prometheus.yml). This file specifies the targets to scrape, the intervals, and other settings.

Our prometheus.yml configuration:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s # Set the scrape interval to every 15 seconds. Default is every 1 minute.
  evaluation_interval: 15s # Evaluate rules every 15 seconds. The default is every 1 minute.
  # scrape_timeout is set to the global default (10s).

# Alertmanager configuration
alerting:
  alertmanagers:
    - static_configs:
        - targets:
          # - alertmanager:9093

# Load rules once and periodically evaluate them according to the global 'evaluation_interval'.
rule_files:
  # - "first_rules.yml"
  # - "second_rules.yml"

# A scrape configuration containing exactly one endpoint to scrape:
# Here it's Prometheus itself.
scrape_configs:
  # The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
  - job_name: "com619-devops"

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

    static_configs:
            - targets: ["127.0.0.1:8080"]

    metrics_path: /metrics/prometheus

  - job_name: 'Sever stats'
    static_configs:
             - targets: ['127.0.0.1:9100']

Grafana

What is Grafana?

Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring and observability. It provides a customizable and feature-rich interface for visualizing metrics from various data sources, including Prometheus.

Setting Up Grafana

To set up Grafana:

1. Install Grafana on a server.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name com619-devops.uksouth.cloudapp.azure.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

Grafana is accessible on: https://com619-devops.uksouth.cloudapp.azure.com/grafana. Authentification has been set up with username and password to access to Grafana.

1. Add Prometheus as a data source in Grafana.

2. Create dashboards to visualize key metrics.

Grafana Dashboards

Our Grafana dashboards are tailored to provide insights into critical metrics, including response times, error rates, and resource utilization.