StatsD + Graphite + Grafana + Prometheus + Alertmanager

This image contains a sensible default configuration of StatsD, Graphite, Grafana and Cabot alerting.

Getting Started

You should have docker, docker-compose installed on your machine. The container exposes the following ports:

• 80: the Grafana web interface.
• 8080: the Graphite web port
• 2003: the Graphite data port
• 8125: the StatsD UDP port.
• 9125: the StatsD repeater’s UDP port.
• 8126: the StatsD administrative port.
• 9102: statsD prometheus metrics
• 9090: prometheus metrics
• 9093: alertmanager

To start everything, you need to type following command in your terminal:

docker-compose up -d

To start specifically graphite (or grafana), you can type the service names as:

docker-compose up -d grafana

NOTE Alerts are not started by default

To start alerting, start the alerting containers

docker-compose -f docker-compose-cabot.yml up -d

This repo also contains a makefile to ease interacting with containers.

Starting all services:

$ make up

To stop the container

$ make down

To run container’s shell

$ make shell

To view the container log

$ make tail

Logging into grafana

Once your container is running all you need to do is:

• open your browser pointing to http://localhost (or another port if you changed it)
  • Docker with VirtualBox on macOS: use docker-machine ip instead of localhost
• login with the default username (admin) and password (admin)
• Go to datasources and check if graphite is there as default datasource

Adding dashboards

Adding dashboards is easy. All you need to do is:

• Click the + icon from left menu, click “dashboard”
• Goto Add Query and select “graphite” as the datasource
• Either click the “select metric” from query editor, or type your full metric path, for ex- stats.counters.myapp.foo.bar.count

Viewing Alerts

Open localhost:5000 in your browser. It will ask for default credentials for the first timers.

Configuring graphite with cabot

Step 1 - Create instance check

The first step is to check if your alerting system can ping the graphite service. To do so,

• Goto Checks and create a ICMP check
• give it any name and leave everything as it is, save

Step 2 - Create instance

• Goto Create instance
• Name it anything. Enter graphite in the Address field (without http://)
• In the status check, select the check you created in step 1

Now, once done, visit Checks page again and hopefully you’ll be seeing a passing status on the check

Creating Alerts

Cabot has three basic modules:

1. Instances
2. Services
3. Checks

Since cabot’s take on these modules and how to use them, is very obscure, I will try to document it here and give a rough idea
of how it should be used with this project’s configuration. The whole idea revolves around the “Service based architecture”.

First, we create instances. Name them by their hostname or logical names. For instance, memcache-1, redis-1, redis-2 etc.

Second, create services based on those instances. For instance, memcache service may run on memcache-1. API service may run on api-1, api-2 and memcache-1 (say memcache server has spaces)

Third, create checks to run. Checks can be based on services, or on instances. For ex-

• To check rate of 5xx HTTP responses on API service is below 10%, we will create a Graphite check that runs on API service.
• To check if memcache-1 server is responding, we will create HTTP check that runs on memcache-1 instance

Creating instances

• Goto Create instance
• Name it anything

Creating services

• Goto Create service
• Name it anything

Creating checks

Checks are of following types:

1. Graphite checks: Checks for metrics

• Goto Create graphite check
• Name it anything

1. HTTP checks: Checks for HTTP status code (health checks)

• Goto Create HTTP check
• Name it anything

1. Jenkin checks: Checks for job build status (continuous integration checks)

• Goto Create Jenkin check
• Name it anything

1. ICMP checks: Checks for ping status (continuous integration checks)

• Goto Create ICMP check
• Name it anything