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Deploying Scylla Monitoring Stack Without Docker¶

Introduction¶

The following instructions will help to deploy Scylla Monitoring Stack in cases where you can not use the recommended Docker version.

Please note, Scylla recommends you use the Docker version as it will provide you with most updated, current Scylla Monitoring system.

Scylla Monitoring uses the following components:

Alertmanager
Grafana Loki
Prometheus
Grafana

The common scenario for users who use their own standalone installation, is that they already have such a server and would like to consolidate. We assume that that you already have Prometheus and Grafana running but we will add minimal installation instruction for all componenents.

We suggest that you follow the installation instruction of each of those products from their official documentation. It is also recommended that all servers will run as a service.

Minimal Production System Recommendations¶

CPU - at least 2 physical cores/ 4vCPUs
Memory - 15GB+ DRAM and proportional to the number of cores.
Disk - persistent disk storage is proportional to the number of cores and Prometheus retention period (see the following section)
Network - 1GbE/10GbE preferred

Calculating Prometheus Minimal Disk Space requirement¶

Prometheus storage disk performance requirements: persistent block volume, for example an EC2 EBS volume

Prometheus storage disk volume requirement: proportional to the number of metrics it holds. The default retention period is 15 days, and the disk requirement is around 12MB per core per day, assuming the default scraping interval of 20s.

For example, when monitoring a 6 node Scylla cluster, each with 16 CPU cores (so a total of 96 cores), and using the default 15 days retention time, you will need minimal disk space for prometheus of

6 * 16 * 15 * 12MB ~ 16GB

To account for unexpected events, like replacing or adding nodes, we recommend allocating at least x2-3 space, in this case, ~50GB. Prometheus Storage disk does not have to be as fast as Scylla disk, and EC2 EBS, for example, is fast enough and provides HA out of the box.

Calculating Prometheus Minimal Memory Space requirement¶

Prometheus uses more memory when querying over a longer duration (e.g. looking at a dashboard on a week view would take more memory than on an hourly duration).

For Prometheus alone, you should have 60MB of memory per core in the cluster and it would use about 600MB of virtual memory per core. Because Prometheus is so memory demanding, it is a good idea to add swap, so queries with a longer duration would not crash the server.

# ScyllaDB Nodes	# Cores Per ScyllaDB Node	Prometheus Retention in Days	Prometheus RAM	Prometheus Storage
			0	0

The main item to set an alert on is the available disk space in the monitoring system. Data is indefinitely accrued on the Prometheus data directory. The current monitoring solution does not churn data.

Note

Confirm before installing, that your Grafana and Prometheus versions are supported by the Scylla Monitoring Stack version you want to install. Scylla-Monitoring follows the latest Prometheus and Grafana releases tightly. See the Scylla Monitoring Stack Compatibility Matrix.

Install Scylla Monitoring Stack¶

The following procedure uses a CentOS 7 based instance

Download the latest Scylla Monitoring Stack release.

wget https://github.com/scylladb/scylla-monitoring/archive/refs/tags/scylla-monitoring-4.2.1.tar.gz

Open the tar

tar -xvf scylla-monitoring-*.tar.gz

Install Alertmanager¶

Tested with alertmanager 0.22.2 version

Install alertmanager

wget https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager/releases/download/v0.22.2/alertmanager-0.22.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xvf alertmanager-*.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Copy the following file: rule_config.yml from prometheus/ directory to alertmanager.yml in the alertmanager installation directory.

For example:

cp -p /home/centos/scylla-monitoring-scylla-monitoring-4.2.1/prometheus/rule_config.yml alertmanager-0.22.2.linux-amd64/alertmanager.yml

Start the Alertmanager

For example:

cd alertmanager-0.22.2.linux-amd64
./alertmanager

Verify that Alertmanager is up and running, point your browser to the Alertmanager IP:Port

For example:

http://192.168.135.166:9093/

Install Grafana Loki¶

Loki is a log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. Scylla Monitoring uses Loki for alerts and metrics generation. It does not replaces your centralized logging server, but it can, check Loki-Grafana documentation if you want to use it for centralized log collection.

We recomand using Loki with containers, but you can install it locally as described in Loki installation

You will need to run both Loki and Promtail. Loki responsible for log parsing and acts as a Grafana and Proemtheus data-source and Generate alerts that are sent to the Alertmanager.

Promtail load logs into Loki, there are multiple ways of doing that, we suggest to use of rsyslog, this way you can add Promtail (and Loki) as a second log collection server.

Loki Related files

Loki has a configuration file and a rule file. You need to copy and modify the configuration.

mkdir -p /etc/loki/rules
mkdir -p /etc/loki/config
cp loki/rules/* /etc/loki/rules
cp loki/conf/loki-config.template.yaml /etc/loki/config/loki-config.yaml

Edit /etc/loki/config/loki-config.yaml and replace ALERTMANAGER with the alertmanager ip:port (i.e. localhost:9093)

Promtail Related files

Promtail has a configuration file. You need to copy and modify the configuration.

mkdir -p /etc/promtail/
loki/promtail/promtail_config.template.yml /etc/promtail/config.yml

Edit /etc/promtail/config.yml and replace LOKI_IP with Loki’s ip:port (i.e. localhost:3100)

Install Prometheus¶

Tested with Prometheus version 2.27.1

Note

If you already have a prometheus server, beside the expected scrap jobs, make sure you take the Prometheus rules directory. The files not only contains important alerts, they are containing recording rules, without it different asspects of the dashboards will not work.

Install Prometheus

wget https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus/releases/download/v2.27.1/prometheus-2.27.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xvf prometheus-*.linux-amd64.tar.gz

2. Create Data and Config directories .. code-block:: shell

mkdir -p /prometheus/data mkdir -p /etc/prometheus/prom_rules/ mkdir -p /etc/scylla.d/prometheus/

Copy the following files: scylla_servers.yml, prometheus.rules.yml from prometheus/ directory to Prometheus installation directory.

Copy prometheus/prometheus.yml.template to prometheus.yml

For example:

cp scylla-monitoring-scylla-monitoring-4.2.1/prometheus/prom_rules/*.yml/etc/prometheus/prom_rules/
cp scylla-monitoring-scylla-monitoring-4.2.1/prometheus/prometheus.yml.template /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

Edit the prometheus.yml file to point to the correct static data sources.

Note

Make sure to include the honor_labels: false parameter in the prometheus.yml file.

vi /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml

Set the alertmanger address and port by replacing AM_ADDRESS in the file.

For example if the alertmanager will run on the same host:

alerting:
   alertmanagers:
   - static_configs:
       - targets:
           - 127.0.0.1:9093

Replace the files in to point to the right local file, typically for scylla, node_exporter and manager_agent you can use the same file (scylla_servers.yml).

For example the scrape config for Scylla:

global:
  scrape_interval: 5s # By default, scrape targets every 5 second.
  scrape_timeout: 4s # Timeout before trying to scape a target again

  # Attach these labels to any time series or alerts when communicating with
  # external systems (federation, remote storage, Alertmanager).
  external_labels:
    monitor: 'scylla-monitor'

scrape_configs:
- job_name: scylla
  honor_labels: false
  file_sd_configs:
    - files:
      - /etc/scylla.d/prometheus/scylla_servers.yml
  relabel_configs:
    - source_labels: [__address__]
      regex:  '([^:]+)'
      target_label: __address__
      replacement: '${1}:9180'

    - source_labels: [__address__]
      regex:  '(.*):.+'
      target_label: instance
      replacement: '${1}'

Create and set scylla_servers.yml file point to your Scylla nodes and scylla_manager_server.yml file to point to your Scylla Manager.

Note

There is no need to configure node_exporter_server. Instead, in the Prometheus scrape config of the node_exporter you can use the same file you used for Scylla and Prometheus will assume you have a node_exporter running on each Scylla server.

An example for those files can be found under the Prometheus directory: prometheus/scylla_servers.example.yml and prometheus/scylla_manager_servers.example.yml

Note

You must have both files even if you are not using Scylla Manager

Add the labels for the cluster and data-center

scylla_servers.yml:

For example:

cat scylla_servers.yml
# List Scylla end points

- targets:
  - 192.168.66.6
  - 192.168.66.244
  labels:
    cluster: cluster1
    dc: dc1
- targets:
    - 172.17.0.3
  labels:
    cluster: cluster1
    dc: dc2

Note

See the previous note about deprecating the node_exporter_servers.yml file.

scylla_manager_server.yml

For example:

- targets:
  - 127.0.0.1:5090

Start Prometheus server:

For example:

cd scylla-monitoring-scylla-monitoring-4.2.1/
./prometheus --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml --storage.tsdb.path /prometheus/data

Data should start accumulate on: /prometheus/data

Verify that Prometheus is up and running, point your browser to the Prometheus IP:Port

For example:

http://192.168.135.166:9090/

Prometheus console should be visible

Verify that the node_exporter and scylla metrics accumulating in the server by executing a query through the console

For example:

node_memory_MemFree

And

scylla_reactor_utilization

At this point Scylla is emitting the metrics and Prometheus is able to store them.

Install Grafana¶

Tested with Grafna 7.5.7

Install Grafana based on the instructions here

Depends if you installed Grafana from a repository (yum install), or if you downloaded the zip version, the directory structure will be different in the rest of the steps.

Access Scylla-Grafana-monitoring directory

cd scylla-monitoring-scylla-monitoring-4.2.1/

Copy the plugins to the grafana plugins directory (by default /var/lib/grafana/)

sudo cp -r grafana/plugins /var/lib/grafana/

If you installed Grafana from packages, instead of /var/lib/grafana/ you should copy it to public/app inside the directory you opened Grafana in.

For example:

cp -r grafana/plugins ../grafana-7.5.7/public/app

Provision the Dashboards

For example Scylla Open-source version 4.5 and Scylla manager version 2.4

For Grafana installed with yum install

sudo cp grafana/load.yaml /etc/grafana/provisioning/dashboards/
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/grafana/dashboards
sudo cp -r grafana/build/* /var/lib/grafana/dashboards

For Grafana installed from packages

cp -p -r grafana/build/* ../grafana-7.5.7/public/build/
cp -p grafana/load.yaml ../grafana-7.5.7/conf/provisioning/dashboards/load.4.5.yaml
cp -p grafana/load.yaml ../grafana-7.5.7/conf/provisioning/dashboards/load.manager_2.4.yaml

Edit the load.* files in /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/conf/provisioning/dashboards/ for the correct path, for example load.4.5.yaml would point to: /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/public/build/ver_4.5.

Note

A note about using folders, if you provision multiple Scylla versions, use the version as a folder name. Otherwise, no need to configure a FOLDER.

Set the data source by copy datasource.yml and edit it

sudo cp grafana/datasource.yml /etc/grafana/provisioning/datasources/

Note

Scylla uses a plugin to read from some system tables see the section below about using it.

For Grafana installed from packages

cp -p grafana/datasource.yml /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/conf/provisioning/datasources/

You should set the Prometheus and the alertmanager IP and port.

For example

sudo cat /etc/grafana/provisioning/datasources/datasource.yml
apiVersion: 1
datasources:
 - name: prometheus
   type: prometheus
   url: http://192.168.135.167:9090
   access: proxy
   basicAuth: false

 - name: alertmanager
   type: camptocamp-prometheus-alertmanager-datasource
   orgId: 1
   typeLogoUrl: public/img/icn-datasource.svg
   access: proxy
   url: http://192.168.135.166:9093
   password:
   user:
   database:
   basicAuth:
   isDefault:
   jsonData:
     severity_critical: '4'
     severity_high: '3'
     severity_warning: '2'
     severity_info: '1'

Start the Grafana service

For Grafana installed with yum install

sudo service grafana-server start

For Grafana installed from packages:

cp -p /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/conf/sample.ini /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/conf/scylla.ini

Edit scylla.ini to reflect the right paths in the paths section of the file.

plugins = /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/data/plugins
provisioning = /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/conf/provisioning

Start the server:

cd /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/
./bin/grafana-server -config /home/centos/grafana-7.5.7/conf/scylla.ini

Make sure Grafana is running

Point your browser to the Grafana server port 3000, the assumption is that Grafana and Prometheus are collocated on the same server.

Using Scylla Plugin with Grafana¶

Scylla Monitoring uses a plugin to read from some of the System tables. For the plugin to work it needs to be installed, configured and there should be a CQL connectivity between the Scylla Monitoring and the Scylla servers.

Because the plugin gives access to the Scylla tables, we strongly encourage you to add a user with read-only access restricted to the system keyspace and configure the plugin to use that user.

Setting a monitoring user¶

This part is optional, but is highly recommended. The instruction at enable authorization covers all the following items in details.

If you have not done so, enable authorization first.
Add a new ROLL for the scylla monitoring: CREATE ROLE scylla_monitoring WITH PASSWORD = 'scylla_monitoring' AND LOGIN = true; make sure to give it a proper password.
Add SELECT permissions to the new user: GRANT SELECT on KEYSPACE system TO scylla_monitoring;

Installing the Plugin¶

Grafana reads plugins from its plugin directory, copy Scylla Plugin from ‘grafana/plugins/scylla-datasource’ as described in the Grafana installation section.

Configure the Plugin¶

Add an entry to the datasource.yml file

- name: scylla-datasource
  type: scylladb-scylla-datasource
  orgId: 1
  isDefault:
  jsonData:
  host: ''
#  secureJsonData:
#    user: 'scylla_monitoring'
#    password: 'scylla_monitoring'

As mentioned previously it is safer to use a dedicated user/password for the monitoring with limited access privileges. Un-comment the relevant section if you do so, note that the username/password are only visible in the file.

Enable the Plugin¶

Grafana will not load unsigned plugins, for that you will need to enable it with Grafana. Edit Grafana grafana.ini file and add the line allow_loading_unsigned_plugins: scylladb-scylla-datasource.

See more about it the Grafana configurtion.

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