As I have mentioned in a previous blog post – Business activities would continue normal, the primary focus right now is enhancing monitoring and alerting. The strategy is to have a centralized logging and monitoring. Then anomaly detection and alerts. As part of this effort, I came across an excellent utility known as collectd. This tool is easy to install and configure. An alternate is statsd.
I have been looking for metric tools i.e servers that are lightweight, easy to configure and can be easily used from C# applications i.e I want to ingest metrics from my C# applications and consume from C# applications. collectd has GRPC plugin, this would mean a GRPC application can be developed in any programming language. I would definitely provide some code examples for ingesting metrics and reading metrics in the future. For now this is a getting started with collectd blog post.
The installation instructions are bit messed up for collectd, specifically the service file of collectd needs to be manually edited based upon your installation location. As of now, I am collecting some simpler metrics, but there are some plugins that would allow for enhanced metrics gathering.
All the logs are being ingested into AWS CloudWatch. Now, I would be developing some dashboards for monitoring, setting up alerting rules etc… I don’t like existing monitoring front-ends due to very less security restrictions. I want my dashboard to be very secure.
Based on collectd – wiki – first steps here is a summary of installation procedure:
The list of library dependencies for plugins can be found here: README
> sudo apt-get install build-essential
// Install any necessary dependency libraries of plugins, I have installed the following
> sudo apt-get install libgrpc-dev libiptc-dev libmysqlclient-dev libprotobuf-dev libprotobuf-c-dev
> cd cd /tmp/
> wget https://storage.googleapis.com/collectd-tarballs/collectd-5.12.0.tar.bz2
> tar jxf collectd-5.12.0.tar.bz2
> cd collectd-5.12.0
> ./configure
> make all install
> sudo nano /opt/collectd/etc/collectd.confI have enabled logfile, syslog, cpu, csv, df, disk, load, memory, swap, uptime, users plugins. These plugins require very less configuration. For csv specify an directory in configuration, for logfile specify a file.
The following was for Ubuntu, but based upon your system edit the collectd.service file. Look for the proper location of the config file, binary and then enable and start the service. On Ubuntu:
Service file: /lib/systemd/system/collectd.service
Configuration file: /opt/collectd/etc/collectd.conf
Binary: /opt/collectd/sbin/collectd
–
Mr. Kanti Kalyan Arumilli
B.Tech, M.B.A
Founder & CEO, Lead Full-Stack .Net developer
ALight Technology And Services Limited
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