Promtimer

In 7.0, Couchbase Server has moved to use Prometheus as the storage backend for stats and when logs are collected, a Prometheus snapshot is generated and included in the zip archive. Promtimer is a tool that uses Prometheus itself and Grafana to allow easy, powerful browsing of Prometheus metrics (stats) available in cbcollects.

In addition to offline browsing of stats, Promtimer supports setting up Grafana to run against a live Couchbase Server cluster.

If you've already installed, here are a some quick links you might be interested in:

• Dashboards README
• Todos

Idea

Promtimer:

1. When running against cbcollects, starts a Prometheus server for each cbcollect you are interested in exploring. (When run against a live cluster this step is not necessary.)
2. Generates a convenient Grafana configuration with anonymous login, a custom home dashboard, data sources and dashboards.
3. Starts Grafana allowing you to login and browse dashboards that collect metrics from across each node in the cluster.
4. Creates dashboard annotations based on important events that happened in the cbcollect, taking information from the diag.log (or from an events.log file generated by the Event Logger) or from the /logs REST API.

Dependencies

You will need:

• Python 3.8 or later
• Grafana (version 7.1 or later)
• Promtimer

To browse stats online, all you need is a live cluster to run against.

For offline browsing of stats, you will additionally need:

• A Prometheus binary (version 2.20 or later)
• Some cbcollects
• (Optional) Event Logger from cbmultimanager if you wish to generate an events.log file

If you happen to be building Couchbase Server 7.0 or later, you will already have a Prometheus binary: it's in the install/bin directory of one of your local builds. If you don't, the Getting Started instructions on the Prometheus website are comprehensive. You don't actually need to install Prometheus, you just need the binary. Downloading and unzipping the pre-compiled binaries for your platform is sufficient.

If you're on Mac,brew is convenient:

brew install prometheus

It's also possible to build Prometheus from source yourself. This is straightforward:

git clone git@github.com:prometheus/prometheus.git
cd prometheus
make prometheus

You'll need a full Grafana install. The grafana-server binary alone isn't sufficient as Grafana ships with many configuration files. Installation instructions on the Grafana website look comprehensive. Follow the instructions for your platform to get a recent version of Grafana. On Mac, it's easy:

brew install grafana

To get Promtimer, clone this repo locally:

git clone https://github.com/couchbaselabs/promtimer.git

As to cbcollects, you probably wouldn't be reading this if you didn't already have them.

cbbackupmgr stats files

For visualisation of cbbackupmgr stats files, you'll also need access to the private backup repository in order to use the cbmstatparser utility. You'll need to either add the cbmstatparser binary to your path or manually specify it with the --cbmstatparser-path flag.

How to Use Promtimer for Offline Analysis

Visualising CBCollects

Assemble the cbcollects in a directory. It's fine if you unzip them, but it's not necessary.

Start Promtimer:

bin/promtimer [--prometheus <path-to-prometheus-binary>]
     [--grafana-home <path-to-grafana-shared-config-home>]

The path-to-prometheus-binary specifies the path to the prometheus binary and must be specified if the binary you wish to use isn't on your PATH.

The path-to-grafana-shared-config-home is what is known in Grafana terminology as the "homepath". This is the out-of-the-box Grafana shared config path. On brew-installed Grafana on Macs this is something like:

/usr/local/share/grafana

On linux systems the homepath should usually be:

/usr/share/grafana

Promtimer defaults the Grafana homepath to these locations on these platforms. However, if you're on a different platform or want to use a different homepath you'll need to explicitly specify it.

The Grafana dashboards page should open for you automatically. If not, navigate to localhost:13300/dashboards in your browser and begin exploring the available dashboards.

Visualising cbbackupmgr stats files

Ensure that you have access to either a backup archive or a cbbackupmgr collect zip file.

Start Promtimer:

promtimer --backup-archive-path <path-to-backup-archive-or-zip>

The above command assumes that cbmstatparser is available on your PATH. If it isn't, you'll need to specify the location of the cbmstatparser binary manually via the --cbmstatparser-path flag.

The path-to-backup-archive-or-zip specifies the path to either a backup archive or to a cbbackupmgr collect zip file.

The Grafana dashboards page should open for you automatically. If not, navigate to localhost:13300/dashboards in your browser and begin exploring the available dashboards.

How to Use Promtimer for Online Monitoring

Start Promtimer and provide the URL to the cluster and the name of the user that Promtimer should authenticate with:

bin/promtimer --cluster <host:port> --user username [--password password]

You'll be securely prompted for the password at the command line, if not specified.

Annotations from System Events

Promtimer will grab user log information (from the diag.log in the offline case and the /logs REST API in the online case) and create dashboard annotations in Grafana for important system events.

As an option, Promtimer also supports the creating annotations based on an events.log file for system events generated by the Event Logger in the cbmultimanager repository. Read here for more information on the Event Logger.

Clean Up

Promtimer creates a .promtimer sub-directory in the directory where it's started and places the Grafana configuration. To clean up, remove this directory:

rm -rf .promtimer

Want to Help?

Awesome! See the list of todos.