Contents

• Introduction
  • Overview
  • Pre-requisites
  • Installation & Configuration
    • Post Configuration
    • Alerting
    • Test Alerts
    • Install Dashboard
  • Security Considerations
    • Production Security
  • Troubleshooting
    • Mac Users
  • Interesting Projects that use this Repo

A Prometheus & Grafana docker-compose stack

Here's a quick start to stand-up a Prometheus stack containing Prometheus, Grafana and Node scraper to monitor your Docker infrastructure. A big shoutout to philicious for kicking this project off!

Pre-requisites

Before we get started installing the Prometheus stack. Ensure you install the latest version of docker and docker swarm on your Docker host machine. Docker Swarm is installed automatically when using Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows.

Installation & Configuration

Clone the project locally to your Docker host.

If you would like to change which targets should be monitored or make configuration changes edit the /prometheus/prometheus.yml file. The targets section is where you define what should be monitored by Prometheus. The names defined in this file are actually sourced from the service name in the docker-compose file. If you wish to change names of the services you can add the "container_name" parameter in the docker-compose.yml file.

Once configurations are done let's start it up. From the /prometheus project directory run the following command:

$ docker stack deploy -c docker-compose.yml prom

That's it the `docker stack deploy' command deploys the entire Grafana and Prometheus stack automagically to the Docker Swarm. By default cAdvisor and node-exporter are set to Global deployment which means they will propogate to every docker host attached to the Swarm.

The Grafana Dashboard is now accessible via: http://<Host IP Address>:3000 for example http://192.168.10.1:3000

username - admin
password - foobar (Password is stored in the `config.monitoring` env file)

In order to check the status of the newly created stack:

$ docker stack ps prom

View running services:

$ docker service ls

View logs for a specific service

$ docker service logs prom_<service_name>

Post Configuration

Now we need to create the Prometheus Datasource in order to connect Grafana to Prometheus

• Click the Grafana Menu at the top left corner (looks like a fireball)
• Click Data Sources
• Click the green button Add Data Source.

Alerting

Alerting has been added to the stack with Slack integration. 2 Alerts have been added and are managed

Alerts - prometheus/alert.rules Slack configuration - alertmanager/config.yml

The Slack configuration requires to build a custom integration.

• Open your slack team in your browser https://<your-slack-team>.slack.com/apps
• Click build in the upper right corner
• Choose Incoming Web Hooks link under Send Messages
• Click on the "incoming webhook integration" link
• Select which channel
• Click on Add Incoming WebHooks integration
• Copy the Webhook URL into the alertmanager/config.yml URL section
• Fill in Slack username and channel

View Prometheus alerts http://<Host IP Address>:9090/alerts View Alert Manager http://<Host IP Address>:9093

Test Alerts

A quick test for your alerts is to stop a service. Stop the node_exporter container and you should notice shortly the alert arrive in Slack. Also check the alerts in both the Alert Manager and Prometheus Alerts just to understand how they flow through the system.

High load test alert - docker run --rm -it busybox sh -c "while true; do :; done"

Let this run for a few minutes and you will notice the load alert appear. Then Ctrl+C to stop this container.

Install Dashboard

I created a Dashboard template which is available on Grafana Docker Dashboard. Simply download the dashboard and select from the Grafana menu -> Dashboards -> Import

This dashboard is intended to help you get started with monitoring. If you have any changes you would like to see in the Dashboard let me know so I can update Grafana site as well.

Here's the Dashboard Template

Grafana Dashboard - dashboards/Grana_Dashboad.json Alerting Dashboard - dashboards/System_Monitoring.json

Security Considerations

This project is intended to be a quick-start to get up and running with Docker and Prometheus. Security has not been implemented in this project. It is the users responsability to implement Firewall/IpTables and SSL.

Since this is a template to get started Prometheus and Alerting services are exposing their ports to allow for easy troubleshooting and understanding of how the stack works.

Production Security:

Here are just a couple security considerations for this stack to help you get started.

• Remove the published ports from Prometheus and Alerting servicesi and only allow Grafana to be accessed
• Enable SSL for Grafana with a Proxy such as jwilder/nginx-proxy or Traefik with Let's Encrypt
• Add user authentication via a Reverse Proxy jwilder/nginx-proxy or Traefik for services cAdvisor, Prometheus, & Alerting as they don't support user authenticaiton
• Terminate all services/containers via HTTPS/SSL/TLS

Troubleshooting

It appears some people have reported no data appearing in Grafana. If this is happening to you be sure to check the time range being queried within Grafana to ensure it is using Today's date with current time.

Mac Users

The node-exporter does not run the same as Mac and Linux. Node-Exporter is not designed to run on Mac and in fact cannot collect metrics from the Mac OS due to the differences between Mac and Linux OS's. I recommend you comment out the node-exporter section in the docker-compose.yml file and instead just use the cAdvisor.

Interesting Projects that use this Repo

Several projects utilize this Prometheus stack. Here's the list of projects:

• Docker Pulls - Visualize Docker-Hub pull statistics with Prometheus
• GitHub Monitoring - Monitor your GitHub projects with Prometheus
• Traefik Reverse Proxy/Load Balancer Monitoring - Monitor the popular Reverse Proxy/Load Balancer Traefik with Prometheus

Have an intersting Project which use this Repo? Submit yours to the list