Monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana

This gives an idea about installing prometheus and monitoring with Grafana in windows as a standalone system. Prometheus is a pull based monitoring system, which pulls the monitoring statistics from the agent exporters and saves it in it's timeseries database. Prometheus comes with a simple graph ui for simple graph visualiyation. However, to visualize the metrics in a dashboard, Grafana can be used.

Here 2 components are used to monitor the windows node metrics
a. Prometheus
b. windows node exporter
c. grafana

The prometheus and windows node exporter is covered in the prometheus section.

Prometheus

• The setup consists of prometheus server and the windows node exporter in a single host.

versions

• Prometheus version: 2.15.2.(choose the operating system and architecture from the drop down.)
• Windows 10
• Windows Node exporter version: 0.9.0-amd64

steps

• Download the prometheus tar.gz file
• Unzip the tar.gz file
• Download the Windows Node exporter (wmi) msi file.
• start the wmi execuatable.
• by default it start the exporter in 9182 port.
• In the prometheus folder, open the prometheus.yml, change the target port to 9182. so that the prometheus can pull the metrics from the wmi agent.

  scrape_configs:
    # The job name is added as a label `job=<job_name>` to any timeseries scraped from this config.
    - job_name: 'prometheus'
      static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9182']

• start the prometheus by executing the prometheus.exe

Testing the setup

• By default, prometheus server can be accessed using 9090 port.

• If the setup is correct, then prometheus can be accessed via http://localhost:9090/graph url. This should show like the below image

• to check exporter agents, Go to the status->targets

• click on the endpoint of the target, it will redirect you to a page looks like below image. This displays all the metrics from the window machine (my machine as i have installed in the same host).

• A simple graph can be created out of a metrics with promethues.

Grafana

This is a tool for visualize data from various datasources.

version

• Grafana version: 6.6.1

steps

• download the .msi installer and execute the execuatable.
• By default, the port is 3000. To configure, download the windows binaries and configure the port.

integrating grafana with prometheus

• To access the grafana, http://localhost:3000/

• default username#password is admin#admin

• add data source as prometheus. Give the prometheus endpoint in the URL section. The setting looks like below image.

• You can customize the dashboard.

• However, there is an existing dashboard available for windows node that can be find here.

• To import the existing dashboard, click "+" sign in the left side panel and click import.

• write the number 2129 and configure the settings as shown in the image and click import. This dashboard is specifically for windows node exporter. for linux exporter, use id 1860 to import.

• Then navigate to home and click "Windows Node" dashboard. The dashboard will look like the below image.