monitoring-stack

My current preferred setup for systems monitoring

Systems monitoring is something that as soon as you give it a first try, you'll always feel the need.

This is my current setup for that purpose, that consists on the following elements:

• NGINX
  • Mimics a real application with an API Gateway
  • Redirects the requests on /v1 to JSONPlaceholder
• nginx_exporter e nginx_log_exporter
  • By default, NGINX OSS provides just a few metrics (using nginx_exporter)
  • Therefore, I chose to use nginx_log_exporter to provide a bunch of other metrics, that have a certain level of customization.
• Prometheus
  • Monitoring tool that has satisfied me the most so far
• Grafana
  • Grafana dashboard creation are amazing

Why this stack?

By alternatives

• NGINX Amplify
  • Only supports the few metrics that NGINX provides out-of-the-box.
  • It is hosted only by NGINX ORG itself. We haven't control
• Elastic Search
  • I haven't give a shot to the Elastic family yet. Seems interesting.

Dependencies

• Docker (moby-engine)
  • Maybe test with podman too?
• docker-compose
• make
  • for running aux scripts
• jq
  • for running make show-metrics
  • comes by default in most of linux distros

Usage

• Setup .env file

  cp .env.example .env

• Start services

  docker-compose up

• Add Prometheus to Grafana data sources
• Start messing around creating graphs
  • See all available metrics

    make show-metrics

TODO

• Use NGINX's error.log to generate metrics with nginx_log_exporter