Monitoring Axual

The Axual monitoring stack

Axual offers support for the following components in the management stack, and also offers it alongside the platform, in case there is need for a monitoring stack as well:

This monitoring stack consists of the following services:

  • cAdvisor is used to report utilization statistics for all Docker containers running on a Host (ie. the machine that runs the Docker containers)

  • Node exporter is used to report Host statistics

  • Prometheus is used to aggregate and store, while providing centralized access to other components' metrics. For this a Time Series Database is used. More information provided by Prometheus.

  • Alertmanager is a component of Prometheus that orchestrates pre-defined alert rules (grouping, deduplicating) into (multiple) output channels

  • Grafana is the so-called "presentation layer" of the stack. To be able to monitor the environment, a person would only have to have access here.

Prometheus overview
Check the Release Notes for specific version information for the services mentioned above

Where to access the monitoring services' management interface.

Where to access your monitoring services' management interface depends on your deployment. Please refer to the following configuration files for each service, and change the endpoint URL based on your configuration.

Service

Configuration file

Service management endpoint*

Prometheus

mgmt-prometheus.sh

https://[HOST]:[PROMETHEUS_PORT]

Grafana

mgmt-grafana.sh

https://[HOST]:[GRAFANA_PORT]

Alertmanager

mgmt-alert-manager.sh

https://[HOST]:[ALERTMANAGER_PORT]

The endpoint host is dependent on in which node.sh file the service has been enabled, and of course the IP address or hostname of that particular host.

Enabling service monitoring

For every service in Axual, monitoring has been added in a unified way and enabled by you by setting two settings in the <service>.sh file:

  • [SERVICE]_PROMETHEUS_ENABLED=yes whether to enable prometheus for this service or not

  • [SERVICE]_PROMETHEUS_PORT=[SERVICE_NODENAME]:[SERVICE_PORT] referring to the endpoint on which the service exposes prometheus metrics.

How are service metrics being retrieved

This is explained in Retrieval of metrics.