Graphing Data and Metrics with Prometheus and Grafana

If you wish to deploy Grafana for alternative graphs, follow the steps below.

Grafana is an analytics platform that can provide alternative graphs for ultrafeeder.

In this guide we will be using Prometheus as the data repository.

Using Grafana and Prometheus in this configuration does not require a plan, account, or credentials for their respective cloud offerings.

Create docker volumes

Open the docker-compose.yml file that was created when deploying ultrafeeder.

Add the following lines to the volumes: section at the top of the file (below the version: section, and before the services: section):

version: '3.8'

volumes:
  prometheus_data:
  grafana_data:

services:
  ultrafeeder:
    # other service configurations

This creates the volumes that will contain prometheus and grafana’s application data.

Deploying prometheus and grafana containers

Open the docker-compose.yml file that was created when deploying ultrafeeder.

Add the following lines to the environment section of the ultrafeeder container definition (in the ultrafeeder: section, below environment: and before the volumes: section):

      - ENABLE_PROMETHEUS=true

Append the following lines to the end of the file:

  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    tty: true
    container_name: prometheus
    hostname: prometheus
    ports:
      - 9090:9090
    volumes:
      - "prometheus_data:/prometheus"

  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana-oss:latest
    tty: true
    container_name: grafana
    hostname: grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 3000:3000
    volumes:
      - grafana_data:/var/lib/grafana

Once the file has been updated, issue the command docker compose up -d in the application directory to apply the changes and bring up the prometheus and grafana containers. This will also restart the ultrafeeder container, which will now use telegraf to feed data to prometheus.

At this point we will need to add a collector definition to prometheus and restart with the new configuration.

1. Issue the command docker exec -it prometheus sh -c "echo -e \" - job_name: 'ultrafeeder'\n static_configs:\n - targets: ['ultrafeeder:9273']\" >> /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml"

2. Issue the command docker stop prometheus

3. Issue the command docker compose up -d

You should also be able to point your web browser at:

• http://docker.host.ip.addr:9090/ to access the prometheus console.

• http://docker.host.ip.addr:3000/ to access the grafana console, use admin/admin as initial credentials, you should be prompted to change the password on first login.

Remember to change docker.host.ip.addr to the IP address of your docker host.

Configuring data source and dashboard in Grafana

After you have logged into the grafana console the following manual steps are required to connect to prometheus as the data source

1. Click Add your first data source in the main panel

2. Click Prometheus from the list of options provided

3. Input or select the following options, if the option is not listed, do not input anything for that option:

Option	Input
Name	ultrafeeder
URL	http://prometheus:9090/

Clicking Save & Test should return a green message indicating success. The dashboard can now be imported with the following steps

1. Hover over the four squares icon in the sidebar, click + Import

2. Enter 18148 into the Import via grafana.com section and click Load

3. Select ultrafeeder from the bottom drop down list

4. Click Import on the subsequent dialogue box

At this point you should see a very nice dashboard, you can find it under General in the Dashboards section.