When adopting a new technology, you will always face some challenges. When it comes to container technology, one of the important questions in this regard is how to get insight in the behaviour of your applications and container environment. Which features are essential when it comes to your monitoring system? Which metrics should processes expose? And what about blackbox and whitebox monitoring? In this article, our Prometheus expert Ed Schouten talks about the monitoring of containers.

Dinsdag 16 mei geeft één van onze medewerkers, Ed Schouten, een presentatie over het monitoringsysteem Prometheus op de voorjaarsconferentie van NLUUG. Kumina past Prometheus toe als monitoring systeem voor haar klanten en heeft diverse exporters (plugins) voor Prometheus ontwikkeld. In de presentatie vertellen we je meer over dit schaalbare en moderne monitoringsysteem. We beantwoorden de volgende vragen: Wat is het datamodel van Prometheus? Hoe komt Prometheus aan zijn data? Hoe raadpleeg ik de data en hoe werkt de querytaal? Hoe genereert Prometheus alerts? En natuurlijk uitleg over hoe wij binnen Kumina Prometheus gebruiken. De speker, Ed Schouten, focust zich bij Kumina op het uitrollen van Kubernetes en Prometheus als vervanging voor de bestaande infrastructuur in Linux-clusters. Hiervoor werkte hij tussen 2012 en 2014 voor Google als Site Reliability Engineer, hier deed hij uitgebreide ervaring op met Borg en Borgmon, waar Kubernetes en Prometheus op gebaseerd zijn.

Over the last couple of months we’ve published several blog posts to announce the release of various Open Source metrics exporters for Prometheus. The development of these exporters is an on-going process at Kumina, as we’re working towards replacing our existing Nagios-based monitoring setup with Prometheus. oday we’re proud to present to you our own Prometheus metrics exporter for Postfix, written in Go.

To start this year’s series of contribution to the open source community, we’re proud to announce the release of yet another tool that we use to monitor our production setup, namely a Prometheus metrics exporter for the Dovecot POP/IMAP mail server. If your email setup is also based on Dovecot and use Prometheus for monitoring, we’d like to invite you to give this exporter a try.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been working on replacing and improving our existing monitoring and trending setup with Prometheus. After searching online, we haven’t been able to find a Prometheus metrics exporter that could act as a drop-in replacement for pmacct, which is why we’ve decided to develop it ourselves, called promacct. Where proamcct differs from pmacct is that instead of periodically storing results to a database, it provides access to its metrics over HTTP, allowing Prometheus to scrape it directly. Today we’re glad to announce that we’re releasing promacct as Open Source Software. Be sure to give it a try and let us know whether it works for you.

Today we’re happy to announce that Birdwatcher is now available on ​our company’s GitHub page. Birdwatcher accesses Calico/BIRD metrics through Prometheus. If you’re a user of both Calico and Prometheus, be sure to give it a try. Enjoy!