In this SIG, you will see a demonstration of Prometheus (for monitoring), followed by Grafana (for visualising monitoring data in dashboards). This will be followed by a practical workshop where you can try out these tools yourself.
Monitoring is an important way to assess whether a runtime environment is functioning correctly. Is the application responding quickly enough? Is a feature still available? How healthy is a server, and how much space is available on a storage component? Monitoring is the process of collecting, processing and interpreting runtime metrics from application, platform and infrastructure components. It provides insight into the current status, recent history and trends to support intervention, adjustments and analysis.
In this SIG, we will discuss monitoring: why do it, and how would you approach it? What tools and resources do you need? You will then see a demonstration of Prometheus (for monitoring), followed by Grafana (for visualising monitoring data in dashboards). Afterwards, a hands-on workshop will give you the opportunity to try these tools yourself.
PromEtheus
Prometheus (part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation) is a popular open source monitoring tool. It periodically scrapes metrics from various components, collects them in a central data store, makes them available to other systems and continuously checks them against configured conditions, triggering alerts when thresholds are exceeded. Prometheus is the de facto standard for monitoring containers on the Kubernetes platform and many microservice implementations. The Prometheus ecosystem provides tools for collecting metrics from a wide range of technologies and products.
Grafana
Grafana is an open source tool for creating dashboards. It can work with a wide range of data sources, including Prometheus. Prometheus and Grafana are often used together. Grafana dashboards present Prometheus data in a visually appealing way and provide a useful starting point for root cause analysis when a problem is detected, for example by a DevOps engineer who has received an automated notification from the Prometheus alerting mechanism.
What will you do?
In the workshop, you will work with Prometheus. After installing it, you will set up monitoring for several components. You will view and analyse the collected data, configure an alert condition and verify that the alert is triggered. You will then use Grafana to create a dashboard with multiple visualisations based on that data.
By the end of the session, participants will have a shared understanding of the importance and role of monitoring. They will also understand what Prometheus is, what it can be used for and how it relates to other tools used for operational management. The role of Grafana as a complement to Prometheus will also be clear.
Preparation
Bring your laptop and make sure VirtualBox and Vagrant are installed. See
Would you like to attend this knowledge session on 20 September? Send an email to marketing@amis.nl with the subject ‘Registration for knowledge session on 20 September’. Participation is free of charge.
We will provide dinner. If you have any dietary requirements, please mention them in your email. Know someone who might also find this evening interesting? They are very welcome to join. Please ask them to register separately so we can plan the catering and keep track of the available places.
