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Monitoring RPi with Prometheus

Just a bunch of docker services to monitor your Raspberry Pi using prometheus and grafana. It can be used to monitor other platforms as well.

Since this uses docker containers, it can be run on amd64 platforms as well (i.e your windows or linux machine). This guide is generic, any platform specific changes would be highlighted with comments.

Services used

  • Prometheus: Time series database
  • Grafana: Visualisation
  • Blackbox exporter: To probe things using HTTP, ICMP etc etc, check Internet connectivity
  • rpi_cpu_stats: Raspberry Pi CPU temp and freq exporter. You don't need to use this if not using RPi
  • node_exporter: Collects host stats. This needs to be running on each host
  • smartmon_collector: Collects disk stats using S.M.A.R.T

NOTE: node_exporter and smartmon_collector are not run as docker container. They are run as system services

Prerequisite

  • docker
  • docker-compose

Follow this guide if you have to install docker and docker-compose: https://github.com/thundermagic/rpi_media_centre/blob/master/docs/docker_install.md

Usage

Installing node_exporter

Skip this if you are not monitoring the host

Note: Steps taken from https://devopscube.com/monitor-linux-servers-prometheus-node-exporter/. I have modified it for raspberry Pi

1.) Download the latest armv7 version from https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases. At the time of writing, the latest version is 0.18.1. If you are running this on a different platform, then download the relevant platform package

wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v0.18.1/node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-armv7.tar.gz

2.) Unpack the tarball

tar -xvf node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-armv7.tar.gz

3.) Move the node_exporter script to /usr/local/bin/

cd node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-armv7
mv node_exporter /usr/local/bin/

4.) Create a user node_exporter that will be used to run the node_exporter service. If you want to use a different user, then change the user in the systemd_service_samples/node_exporter.service file.

sudo useradd -rs /bin/false node_exporter

5.) Open systemd_service_samples/node_exporter.service with a text editor and modify it if needed. Comments in the file guide you what to modify.

6.) Copy the service file to /etc/systemd/system

cp systemd_service_samples/node_exporter.service /etc/systemd/system/

7.) Start and enable the service

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start node_exporter
sudo systemctl enable node_exporter

8.) You should see the stats at http://<Host-IP>:9100/metrics

Monitoring disk stats

Skip this step if you are not monitoring disk using S.M.A.R.T

You need smartmontools installed on the host to use this. To install it, sudo apt install smartmontools

This uses a script to get disk stats using smartmontools and writes the stats to a file. Node exporter then parses the file and exposes the stats. The script (smartmon.sh) is available at: https://github.com/prometheus-community/node-exporter-textfile-collector-scripts.
A copy of it is in the textfile_collectors directory. If there is a newer version of the this script available, then you can replace it with the newer version in the same directory.

1.) Open textfile_collectors/run_smartmon.sh with a text editor and modify it. Comments in the file guide with modifying

2.) Run this as a service

cp systemd_service_samples/smartmon_collector.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start smartmon_collector
sudo systemctl enable smartmon_collector

You should now have disk stats being written to a file and you should see those stats at http://<Host-IP>:9100/metrics

Running prometheus

1.) Create directory structure like below to store prometheus and grafana data. I have my external hard disk mounted at /mnt/media. You can change it to whatever you like. You would need to change the docker-compose.yaml file accordingly as well.

/mnt/media/appdata  
    ├── grafana
    └── prometheus

2.) Open docker-compose.yaml with a text editor and modify it. Comments in the file guide with modifying

3.) Edit monitoring_config/prometheus.yml file as per your setup.

4.) Run the service

docker-compose up -d

5.) Check containers are running

docker container ls -a

All the containers should show as running. If there is any container stuck in a reboot a cycle, check the directory structure created in previous steps and check container logs for more info.

How do I check container logs?
docker container logs <container_name>

Example, if you have to check logs for prometheus

docker container logs prometheus

If you have to follow/tail logs use the -f flag, example;

docker container logs -f prometheus

Assuming everything went alright, you should have all the servics running now.
You can now access each of the services.

Accessing services

Assuming your IP address is 192.168.4.4

All the port numbers are listed in the docker container ls command under PORTS column

Now you should be able to start building your grafana dashboard. There are dashboard already build, you can just import them and modify them as per your need

Services details

Prometheus

Time series database.
Website: https://prometheus.io/
Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/prom/prometheus
Documentation: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/

Grafana

Analytics and visualisation.
Website: https://grafana.com/
Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/grafana/grafana
Documentation: https://grafana.com/docs/

blackbox_exporter

Probing things with HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP and ICMP.
Website and documentation: https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter
Docker image: https://hub.docker.com/r/prom/blackbox-exporter

rpi_cpu_stats

Prometheus exporter to expose raspberry pi cpu stats like temp and frequencies. Does not rely on vcgencmd command.
I use prometheus node_exporter to monitor the hosts but node exporter was not exposing the cpu temperature and cpu frequencies correctly for raspberry pi. So I created this exporter.
Website: https://github.com/thundermagic/rpi_cpu_stats
Docker image and documentation: https://hub.docker.com/r/thundermagic/rpi_cpu_stats

node_exporter

Collects hosts stats. This needs to run on each host.
Website and documentation: https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter

smartmon_collector:

Collects disk stats. It is a node exporter text file exporter Website and documentation: https://github.com/prometheus-community/node-exporter-textfile-collector-scripts

How to upgrade a service?

When there is a new version of service available, like a newer grafana version, you can follow these steps to upgrade

A bit of a side note regarding docker image tags: Docker images naming conventions is <image name>:<tag>. Usually images have a latest tag that would be pointing to the latest version of the image. In addition to this images could have a tag for specific versions. Check out documentation for the image to know which tags are supported.

Assuming all the services have docker tag of latest, to upgrade;

cd into the directory where docker-compose file is.

To upgrade all services

docker-compose pull
docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d

To upgrade one specific service

Taking example of the grafana service which is using the container name of grafana

docker-compose pull grafana
docker container stop grafana
docker container rm grafana
docker-compose up -d grafana

If a service is using specific tag, then you would need to need to change the docker-compose.yaml file and change the tag to the newer tag.
For example, assuming we have a tag of v2 available for a service (lets call the service as srv1 which uses the same name as container name) that currently is using the tag v1.
Change the tag for the image used by this service to v2 from v1 and then run below commands in the shell. You have to be in the directory which have docker-compose.yaml file, unless you want to use the -f flag with docker-compose command.

docker-compose pull srv1
docker container stop srv1
docker container rm srv1
docker-compose up -d srv1