Monitoring

This document describes the built-in monitoring and observability component that is part of Private Cloud Director. Private Cloud Director uses open source Prometheus, Alert Manager, and Grafana as the key components of it's monitoring stack behind the scenes. The PCD monitoring system is designed to collect infrastructure & application metrics using Prometheus exporters for various PCD components and services. PCD administrators can then leverage these metrics in a variety of ways:

• Metrics visibility via built-in charts in the PCD UI (coming soon)

• Default dashboards provided as part of Grafana

• Metrics that the administrators can consume to feed into their own internal monitoring platforms

Monitoring Architecture

The Private Cloud Director monitoring system leverages three primary components:

1. Prometheus: An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects and stores metrics as time-series data.

2. Alert Manager: Handles alerts sent by the Prometheus server, including deduplicating, grouping, and routing alerts to the correct receiver.

3. Grafana: A multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application that provides charts, graphs, and alerts when connected to supported data sources.

Monitored Metrics

The Private Cloud Director monitoring system tracks metrics across various categories, focusing on hypervisor health and virtual machine performance.

Hypervisor Metrics

Hypervisor metrics provide insight into the health and performance of the Private Cloud Director hosts. Following metrics are tracked today:

• Hypervisor CPU Total: The total CPU resources allocated to the Hypervisor

• Hypervisor Memory Total: The total memory allocated to the Hypervisor

• Hypervisor CPU Usage: The actual CPU utilization of the Hypervisor, showing host resource consumption

• Hypervisor Memory Usage: The actual memory utilization of the Hypervisor, showing hosts memory consumption

Virtual Machine Metrics

Virtual machine metrics provide visibility into individual VM performance. Following metrics are tracked today:

• VM CPU Total: The total CPU resources allocated to the virtual machine

• VM Memory Total: The total memory allocated to the virtual machine

• VM CPU Usage: The actual CPU utilization of the virtual machine, showing how much of the allocated resources are being consumed

• VM Memory Usage: The actual memory utilization of the virtual machine, showing how much of the allocated memory is being consumed

Dashboards

The Private Cloud Director monitoring system comes with pre-configured dashboards designed to provide immediate visibility into key performance indicators:

1. Hypervisor Dashboard: Provides comprehensive metrics and visualizations of hypervisor performance. This dashboard helps identify resource utilization patterns, potential bottlenecks, and capacity planning opportunities at the hypervisor level.

2. VM Dashboard: Displays detailed metrics about virtual machine performance. This dashboard helps monitor and troubleshoot individual VM resource utilization, enabling proactive management of VM resources.

You can access the built-in Grafana dashboard by following the Grafana link from the PCD UI home screen. Default login credentials are: Username: adminPassword: admin Upon first login, you will be prompted to change the default password for security purposes.

Custom Dashboard Creation

You can create custom Grafana dashboards tailored to your specific monitoring needs.

To create a custom dashboard:

1. Log in to the Grafana interface through the Private Cloud Director UI

2. Navigate to the Dashboard section

3. Click "New Dashboard"

4. Add panels by selecting "Add Panel."

5. Choose visualization types and configure data sources

6. Save the dashboard with a descriptive name