Users guide

cloudmon can be a single tool to use when operating the whole monitoring stack. It implements cli commands for every component as well as single command to provision all components.

In a real live it may be preferred to manage certain components of the stack separately by other means (i.e. database). Cloudmon is not enforcing management of most of the components and thus allows getting them out of the management process. There are, however, certain limitations or assumptions that cloudmon just need:

  • currently only Graphite TSDB is supported. This is not a strict architecture decision and any alternatives can be implemented (main thing to remember is that monitoring emits metrics and they need to reach TSDB as well as it must be also possible to query metrics out of DB.)

  • cloudmon “wants” to be able to create databases, at least it definitely needs to have credentials to those databases to further provision components needing database.

  • when cloudmon installs DB it uses postgres database and it uses Patroni for implementing High Availability. In that case it is expected that SSL certificates are managed externally (cloudmon will not try to implement SSL cert management)

Provisioning

Installation and configuration of the software in the context of cloudmon is called provisioning. Certain components are having extra “configure” step that allows to only do configration (in example only manage datasources and dashboards in Grafana without trying to install it).

Provisioning can be triggered by a single invocation of the cloudmon provision to manage all steps in a one shot. Or alternatively every component can be managed individually (i.e. cloudmon graphite provision, cloudmon postgres provision). In every case a path to the configuration file and ansible inventory must be provided to the command.

Starting

Various components of the StackMon support starting and stopping (i.e. to stop/start testing of certain environment). This is normally supported by invoking cloudmon apimon start or similar.

Stopping

A command in a form cloudmon apimon stop is supported for several components.