Monitoring your applications using OpenEBS Director Online

OpenEBS Director Online is a SaaS platform that helps DevOps in handling their Kubernetes clusters using features such as centralized monitoring, logging, ChatOps, and MayaData support. Users can sign up to Director Online using their GitHub or Google credentials or directly with an email address. It is free for basic usage.

Monitoring different metrics of your application helps you understand overall performance, behaviors during high usage, CPU usage, latency, and storage availability and usage. You can keep these records with you to determine the difference in the performance of your application, either within the same environment or a different one. For monitoring, Director Online uses Grafana for time-series analytics.

In this blog, I want to show you how to obtain metrics for your applications in OpenEBS Director Online so that you can monitor performance using Grafana Dashboards.

Currently, 6 applications can be monitored easily using Director Online. They are CockroachDB, Elasticsearch, Minio, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis. Let's look at how to monitor these applications:

For applications like Minio and CockroachDB:

Some applications expose metrics by default and do not require an external exporter. These two are of the same kind. So, let's look at the steps for monitoring for these applications:

(Note: Make sure the pod has all the labels that are present in the application (deployment/Statefulset))

First, connect your cluster to DirectorOnline. You can do this by following the steps described here.

After connecting your cluster to DO, you should find yourself at the "Overview" page.

Here, all your applications will be listed.

In this example, we will enable monitoring for CockroachDB.

2. Now go to Analytics and select "Enable Analytics."

3. Wait for a while (it may take up to 5 minutes), and you will see a small dashboard in front of you.

To view additional graphs, click on "View More" in the bottom right corner of the panel.

If you don't want to see the metrics anymore, you can delete the analytics as well. The steps are shown at the end of this post.

Similarly, you can enable metrics for the Minio application. This can be done as shown:

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For applications like Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis:

Some applications require an external exporter to expose metrics. Director Online currently supports 4 such applications. They are - Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis. Let's now show how to enable metrics for these applications. We will use MySQL for this example.

2. Go to Analytics and select "Enable Analytics," then enter the required details like username, password, etc., in the form, and click on "Submit".

3. Wait for a period of time (it may take up to 5 minutes) and you will see a small dashboard in front of you. Again, you can view additional graphs by clicking on the "View More" button located in the bottom right corner of the panel.

4. If you entered the wrong details of the application in the form, you could edit your entries back from the Analytics tab on the top right corner of the panel. It may also take up to 5 minutes for the changes to be reflected.

If you don't want the metrics anymore, you can delete the analytics as well.

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Likewise, you can enable monitoring for other applications:

Elasticsearch:

Note: For Elasticsearch applications, you need to input data in the username and password field if the application does not have any authentication.

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Redis:

Note: For Redis applications, you can leave the password field empty if the application does not require any password.

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PostgreSQL:

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One more fantastic feature that Director Online provides is the ability to generate and download a Report of your dashboards. Click on the Report button located in the top right panel of the dashboard, and you should get your graphs in PDF format.

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Well, that's all for now, folks. Feel free to ask anything or submit your thoughts in the comments section.

Director Online also has the on-premise setup, called Director OnPrem. To learn more about Director Online and Director OnPrem, refer to the official documentation here.

Happy hacking!