Prometheus system metrics#

Prometheus integration allows you to monitor your Aiven services and understand the resource usage. Additionally, using this integration, you can monitor/track some non-service-specific metrics that may be worth monitoring.

To start monitoring these metrics, you need the Prometheus integration configured and set up the Prometheus server.

To discover the metrics available for your services, make an HTTP GET request to your Prometheus service endpoint. Once your Prometheus integration is configured, you will find your Prometheus service details in the “Prometheus” tab of the Service Overview page. Make a note of the:

  • Prometheus URL

  • Username

  • Password

Then make a request like the one below to get a snapshot of your metrics, replacing the placeholders with the values for your service:

curl -k --user USERNAME:PASSWORD PROMETHEUS_URL/metrics

The resulting output is a full list of the metrics available for your service.

CPU usage#

CPU usage metrics are helpful in determining if the CPU is constantly being maxed out. For a high-level view of CPU usage for a single CPU service, you can use

100 - cpu_usage_idle{cpu="cpu-total"}

Tip

A process with a nice value larger than 0 will be categorized as cpu_usage_nice, which is not included in cpu_usage_user.

It can be useful to monitor cpu_usage_iowait{cpu="cpu-total"}. If this number is high, it indicates the service node is working on something I/O intensive. For example, 40 means 40% of CPU time is waiting for disk or network I/O.

The following table lists some important CPU-related metrics you can collect and monitor:

Metics

Description

cpu_usage_idle

The percentage of time the CPU is idle.

cpu_usage_system

The percentage of time the Kernel code is consuming the CPU.

cpu_usage_user

The percentage of time the CPU is in user-space program with nice value <= 0.

cpu_usage_nice

The percentage of time the CPU is in user-space program with nice value > 0.

cpu_usage_iowait

The percentage of time waiting for I/O operations.

cpu_usage_steal

The percentage of time waiting for the hypervisor to give CPU cycles to the VM.

cpu_usage_irq

The percentage of time the system is handling interrupts.

cpu_usage_softirq

The percentage of time the system is handling software interrupts.

cpu_usage_guest

The percentage of time the CPU is running for a guest OS.

cpu_usage_guest_nice

The percentage of time the CPU is running for a guest OS, with low priority.

These metrics are generated from the Telegraf plugin.

Disk usage#

Monitoring disk usage ensures that applications or processes will not fail due to insufficient disk storage. Consider monitoring disk_used_percent and disk_free.

The following table lists some important disk usage metrics you can collect and monitor:

Metics

Description

disk_free

Free space on service disk.

disk_used

Used space on disk. For example, 8.0e+9 means 8,000,000,000 bytes.

disk_total

The total space on disk (free and used space).

disk_used_percent

The percentage of the disk space used. The is equal to disk_used / disk_total * 100. For example, 80 means 80% service disk usage.

disk_inodes_free

The number of index nodes available on service disk.

disk_inodes_used

The number of index nodes used on service disk.

disk_inodes_total

The total number of index nodes on service disk.

Memory usage#

Metrics to monitoring memory consumption are also essential to ensure the performance of your service. Consider monitoring the mem_available (in bytes) or mem_available_percent, as this is the estimated amount of memory available for application without swapping.

Network usage#

Monitoring the network provides visibility of your network and an understanding of the network utilization and traffic, allowing you to act immediately in case of network issues.

It may be worth monitoring the number of established TCP sessions available in the netstat_tcp_established metric.