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Storage monitoring with Grafana
Painting by Numbers
Performance values as plain old numbers do not present a visually appealing overview of system performance, but graphical dashboards can help you visualize what would otherwise be boring metrics. A number of free applications visualize metrics in almost any form desired, and one of the most popular open source tools in this family is Grafana [1]. Without much programming knowledge, you can build dashboards to present Internet of Things (IoT) values, stock prices, or the performance data of monitored systems. In this article, I show you how to use Grafana in a convenient GUI to display storage performance values, as well as how to retrieve the desired Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) data from InfluxDB.
SNMP, the source for the performance information in this example, is supported by all common operating systems and networked devices. This example uses Synology network-attached storage (NAS) as the data source. However, because the queries only use entries from the Management Information Base (MIB) v2 standard, the example will also work with other Linux-based NAS and storage area network (SAN) devices or commercial storage systems. However, before Grafana can visually evaluate performance data, other tools are needed to collect the data and store the results in a usable way.
InfluxDB Database
Performance data can best be saved in time series databases (TSDBs), which automatically reduce the volume of acquired data by reducing the accuracy of the measurements over time according to appropriate rules. For example, a metric database retains up-to-the-minute readings for several days, but then only hourly readings for older data, and after a further period of time, only one value per day. Popular TSDBs include RRDtool, Prometheus, and InfluxDB.
InfluxDB [2] is a very
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