What has my CPU usage looked like over the past month? How has my HTTP response time changed after on-boarding a bunch of users? How’s my database volume doing for free space after adding a new provider? These are all questions many File Fabric Customers end up asking themselves, and often have to jump into the command-line to run Linux commands to try to piece that information together.
Data visualization is a powerful tool for IT organizations to see more than just current status, but trend lines, as well as correlating changes across multiple metrics. While there are many options available, both opensource and commercial, Grafana is one of the current most popular options.
Here is an example of a custom EFF dashboard running in Grafana:
There are multiple data sources available for Grafana, and a wide range of Linux tools that can input data into those data sources. For this example we went with the most flexible options and selected InfluxDB for the data source, and using the agent Telegraf.
The plugin nature of Grafana and Telegraf allows you to easily adjust the setup if you’ve got an existing Grafana system you can import the EFF dashboard into, and point to any of the 34 output sources that Grafana supports as data sources.
On the Telegraf side, we have a fairly standard template that can be applied into the File Fabric Appliances . See an Example Telegraf conf file.
Once you configure to point to the InfluxDB location and start up telegraph it’s now writing all that metrics into your time series database. You can import the SME dashboard into your Grafana system . You may need to adjust the dashboard if you’re using a different data source.
In addition to visualization, you can also use Grafana to alert as well. Taking those same metrics you can create alert dashboards with predefined alerting thresholds:
This allows you to get email alerts, as well as other notification types, when your system cross those thresholds:
You can try it all out yourself in your EFF environment. The config file and dashboard can be found on our github.
We’d love to hear how it went and if there are any other interesting metrics you’re adding as well.
For more information, you can always contact us at sales@storagemadeeasy.com
*Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
by 
Eric Toczek
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- File Fabric Metrics Monitoring and Visualization using Grafana, InfluxDB and Telegraf - December 7, 2020
