This weekend I decided to check out Grafana. My first test for it was setting up the Zabbix backend. This went much better than I had expected so I started looking at what other data I could pull in. It turns out that Grafana may well be a great tool for centralizing data and metrics from disparate sources. The consensus on the interwebs, as best as I can tell, is that InfluxDB is the backend I should store my metrics in so I’m going try that next. Once InfluxDB is setup my plan is to try out some one-off inputs to it such as:
- Foreman and Puppet stats via foreman_influxdb
- VMware stats via vsphere-influxdb-go
- Veeam metrics to via veeam_grafana
I’m also planning to check out several of the inputs listed on the Telegraf site including:
- Apache
- Nginx
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- MS SQL
- sysstat
- memcached
- php-fpm
- passenger
One of the many posts online that perked my interest in this was https://denlab.io/setup-a-wicked-grafana-dashboard-to-monitor-practically-anything/
Another big motivator was the idea of displaying info from Apache and IIS logs as talked about at https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1094405/Powerful-IIS-Apache-Monitoring-dashboard-using. This project parses the logs with Logstash and stores them in Elasticsearch. Grafana then uses Elasticsearch as another backend. The nice thing about this approach is that I could combine the info in the logs with the metrics pulled in from the Apache, php-fpm, and passenger inputs to Telegraf and the info from Zabbix onto a single dashboard for a holistic view of a web server.
