Monitoring #

Monitoring is essential for ensuring Forwarder’s health, performance, and resource utilization. This document provides a guide on how to collect Prometheus metrics, and setup Grafana.

Dashboard #

The Forwarder dashboard provides a high-level overview of health and performance. It consists of the following sections:

• Errors - general information about the Forwarder health
• HTTP - HTTP traffic metrics
• Resources - memory, CPU, and golang runtime metrics
• Info - version information and build details

Dashboard is available in Grafana dashboards registry. You can also use the source code version from here.

Import Dashboard from Grafana Registry #

If you are familiar with Prometheus and Grafana stack, you can import the dashboard with the following steps:

1. Click Dashboards in the left-side menu.
2. Click New and select Import in the dropdown menu.
3. Perform one of the following steps:
   • Paste a Grafana dashboard ID 20100 and click Load.
   • Paste dashboard JSON text from here directly into the text area.

Step-by-Step Installation #

Forwarder exposes Prometheus metrics in the API server on the /metrics endpoint. The API server listens on localhost:10000 by default. This port will be used in the following steps.

Configure Prometheus #

1. Install and start Prometheus following this guide.
2. Configure Prometheus to scrape metrics from your Forwarder:
   • Open your Prometheus configuration file (usually prometheus.yml).
   • Add a new job to the scrape_configs section:

scrape_configs:
- job_name: 'forwarder'
  scrape_interval: 15s
  static_configs:
    - targets: ['localhost:10000']

Configure Grafana #

1. Install and start Grafana following this guide.
2. Add Prometheus as a data source:
   • Go to Settings > Data Sources.
   • Click Add your first data source.
   • Choose Prometheus and configure the URL (e.g., http://localhost:9090).
3. Import Dashboard from Grafana Registry:
   • Go to the Grafana Dashboard.
   • Click on the New or + icon select Import.
   • Type the following ID to import the dashboard: 20100.

Congratulations! You have successfully set up monitoring for your Forwarder using Prometheus and Grafana. Adjust the configuration parameters as needed based on your specific setup.

Automatic Local Setup #

We have provided a local monitoring setup that you can use to try out the monitoring features of the Forwarder. All you need is a Docker to run Prometheus, Grafana and Forwarder. See local/monitoring for more details.