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Make better use of Prometheus with Grafana, Telegraf, and Alerta
Makeover
Prometheus is specially designed for monitoring large and scalable setups. The solution comprises several components: Prometheus itself is only the time series database. The Prometheus Node Exporter reads and provides basic system values on the target systems. Pushgateway handles the values that Prometheus itself cannot read directly on the hosts. If a data problem arises, the Alertmanager appears, comparing the incoming metric data with freely definable limit values. If a value gets out of control, it generates an alarm.
Theoretically, these components can be used to build a complete monitoring, alerting, and trending (MAT) system that easily monitors large environments, but practically, the components in this compilation lack elementary functions.
In this article, I look at complementary projects that exist for Prometheus that make admin life easier, including ready-made dashboards for data visualization, various metric data exporters, and two tools that display alarms graphically and coherently.
Beautiful Is Not Enough
The measurement data in Prometheus is good, but you need a way to visualize it. For a long time Prometheus developed its own dashboard; today, the official recommendation is to use Grafana, for which Prometheus has a plugin that can be used to configure it as a data source.
If you want to display measured values from Prometheus in Grafana, however, you need suitable dashboards. To aggravate the situation, the metrics provided by Prometheus Node Exporter are not sufficient in many setups. Special cases like MySQL, RabbitMQ, or Open vSwitch are not handled by the Node Exporter.
The Alertmanager also causes trouble. Most conventional monitoring systems offer a clearly arranged web page on which the current alarms are listed. However, the Prometheus Alertmanager only has a rudimentary GUI that does not meet modern requirements.
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