BeeGFS Monitoring Service
The beegfs-mon daemon, which was introduced in BeeGFS version 7, collects statistics from the system
and provides them to the user using a time series database (InfluxDB). For visualization of the data
beegfs-mon provides predefined Grafana panels that can be used out of the box, or the user can use
whatever tool he prefers.
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Installation
The service and the Grafana panels are contained in the optional beegfs-mon package. The package is available from the general BeeGFS repository.
Additionally, a working and reachable InfluxDB setup is required. Installing
InfluxDB should be simple in most cases since there are prebuilt packages available
for all of the distributions that are supported by BeeGFS.
The installation instructions can be found at https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.3/introduction/installation/ .
It can be installed on the same host, but if you have an existing installation, you can use this one
as well. Just make sure beegfs-mon can access it via http.
If you want to use the prebuilt Grafana panels (or want to create your own), you also need Grafana.
It also doesn't need to be on the same host, it just needs http access to the InfluxDB instance. For
installation instructions, please refer to the official website: http://docs.grafana.org/installation/ .
Configuration
Before running beegfs-mon, you need to edit the configuration file /etc/beegfs/beegfs-mon.conf. If
you have everything installed on the same host, you only need to specify the management host
(sysMgmtdHost). If your InfluxDB is installed on another host or you need to use a different
database name, you also need to modify the corresponding entries (dbHostName, dbHostPort,
dbDatabase).
After editing the configuration, you can start the daemon with
$ systemctl start beegfs-mon
Grafana panels: Default installation
You can use the provided installation script which can be found under
/opt/beegfs/scripts/grafana/import-dashboards. For the out-of-the-box setup with InfluxDB and Grafana being
on the same host, just use
$ cd /opt/beegfs/scripts/grafana $ ./import-dashboards default
Grafana panels: Custom installation
In any other case, either provide the script with the URLs to InfluxDB and Grafana
(call the script without arguments for usage instruction) or install them manually.
The latter can be done from within Grafanas web interface:
First, the datasource must be defined. In the main menu, click on Data Sources and
then Add Data Source. Enter a name, hostname and port where your InfluxDB is running. Set the name of the Database (default: beegfs_mon). Save.
To add the dashboards, select Dashboards/Import in the main menu. Select
one of the dashboard .json files. They are located under /opt/beegfs/scripts/grafana/. Select the datasource you created before in the dropdown and click Import. Repeat for the rest of the panels.
You can now click on Dashboards in the main menu and then on the Button to the right of it.
A list of the installed dashboards should pop up, in which you can select the one you want to watch.
If your BeeGFS setup, the beegfs-mon daemon and InfluxDB are already running and are configured
properly, you should already see some data being collected.
For more documentation and help in using Grafana, please visit the official website
http://docs.grafana.org.
Usage
You can connect to Grafana using your web browser. If you installed the predefined panels, you will find four of them: One for meta daemon statistics, one for storage, one for storage targets and one for client operations. You can modify the node shown using the drop down on the upper left corner.
If you want to write your own grafana panels or use other software to process the collected data, you can access the InfluxDB using one of its provided APIs. Please refer to the InfluxDB documentation for details. Here you find a reference of the used fields and tags in the database.
Apache Cassandra Support
With BeeGFS version 7.1, beegfs-mon supports the use of a Apache Cassandra database as database backend. Unless you already have a Cassandra installation you want to use or have other reasons to specifically use Casssandra, we recommend to use InfluxDB. It is more lightweight and easier to handle. Also, there are no Grafana panels available for Cassandra.
To use Cassandra, you need to install a thirdparty library: https://github.com/datastax/cpp-driver. For BeeGFS version 7.1 it has to be version 2.9. Make sure, the dynamic library is located in the standard path, so it can be loaded by the daemon. To load the library and use Cassandra, change the corresponding line in the mon config file from "influxdb" to "cassandra". Cassandra uses slightly different options for configuration as you can see there, but you can achieve the same functionality as with InfluxDB. Please refer to the config file documentation for details.
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