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Accessing Grafana

Simplyblock's control plane includes a Prometheus, Grafana, and Graylog installation.

Grafana retrieves metric data from Prometheus, including capacity, I/O statistics, and the cluster event log. Additionally, Grafana is used for alerting via Slack or email.

The standard retention period for metrics is 7 days. However, this can be changed when creating a cluster.

How to access Grafana

Grafana can be accessed through all management node API. It is recommended to set up a load balancer with session stickyness in front of the Grafana installation(s).

Grafana URLs
http://<MGMT_NODE_IP>/grafana

To retrieve the endpoint address from the cluster itself, use the following command:

Retrieving the Grafana endpoint
sbctl cluster get <CLUSTER_ID> | grep grafana_endpoint

Credentials

The Grafana installation uses the cluster secret as its password for the user admin.

In Kubernetes deployments, logging in with (CLUSTER_ID/CLUSTER_SECRET) is possible as an unprivileged user, or the Grafana password can be retrieved using kubectl as follows for the admin user:

Retrieve the Grafana password
kubectl get secret -n simplyblock simplyblock-grafana-secrets \
    -o jsonpath="{.data.MONITORING_SECRET}" | base64 --decode

The resulting password can be used to log in to Grafana.

Example output for Grafana password
[root@demo ~]# kubectl get secret -n simplyblock simplyblock-grafana-secrets \
    -o jsonpath="{.data.MONITORING_SECRET}" | base64 --decode
sWbpOgbe3bKnCfcnfaDi

Credentials
Username: admin
Password: <PASSWORD>

Grafana Dashboards

All dashboards are stored in per-cluster folders. Each cluster contains the following dashboard entries:

  • Cluster
  • Storage node
  • Device
  • Logical Volume
  • Storage Pool
  • Storage Plane node(s) system monitoring
  • Control Plane node(s) system monitoring

Dashboard widgets are designed to be self-explanatory.

By default, each dashboard contains data for all objects (e.g., all devices) in a cluster. It is, however, possible to filter them by particular objects (e.g., devices, storage nodes, or logical volumes) and to change the timescale and window.

Dashboards include physical and logical capacity utilization dynamics, IOPS, I/O throughput, and latency dynamics (all separate for read, write, and unmap). While all data from the event log is currently stored in Prometheus, they weren't used at the time of writing.