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
Default dashboards provided as part of the built-in Grafana instance
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:
Prometheus: An open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects and stores metrics as time-series data.
Alert Manager: Handles alerts sent by the Prometheus server, including deduplicating, grouping, and routing alerts to the correct receiver.
Grafana: A multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application that provides charts, graphs, and alerts when connected to supported data sources.
Region Mapping
An instance of the monitoring system that includes the three components above is provisioned per region of your Private Cloud Director setup. The metrics displayed in the grafana dashboard for a given region represent aggregated data from all virtualized clusters within that region.
Accessing Grafana Dashboards
Navigate to Home, then:
October 2025+ releases: Enable "Show All Tenants Info" toggle before selecting Grafana Dashboard
Earlier releases: Select Grafana Dashboard directly
Log into Grafana
The default login credentials depend on the version of your current Private Cloud Director setup:
June 2025+ releases: Use your Private Cloud Director administrator credentials to log into Grafana. These are the same credentials you use to access your Private Cloud Director instance.
Earlier releases: Username: admin, Password: admin
You will be prompted to change the default password when you first log in.
Monitored Metrics
The monitoring system tracks metrics across various categories, with a primary focus on hypervisor health and virtual machine performance.
Hypervisor Metrics
Hypervisor metrics provide insight into the health and performance of the Private Cloud Director hosts in a given region.
Note that the identifier shown in the Grafana hypervisor charts corresponds to the Host ID.
The following metrics are tracked today:
Compute Metrics
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
Number of Hosts: Total number of hypervisor hosts running in the region
Storage Metrics
Disk space ext4: Total configured disk space on the root partition across all hosts in the region.
Disk usage ext4: Total used disk space on the root partition across all hosts in the region.
Disk read throughput: Reports read throughput for the root partition across all hosts in the region.
Disk write throughput: Reports write throughput for the root partition across all hosts in the region.
Disk read throughput over time (chart): Shows a chart of read throughput for the root partition per host over time.
Disk write throughput over time (chart): Shows a chart of write throughput for the root partition per host over time.
Networking Metrics
Network RX throughput (chart): Shows a chart of the rate of inbound network traffic per host.
Network TX throughput (chart): Shows a chart of the rate of outbound network traffic per host.
Retention time
Retention time for all Prometheus metrics is 15 days.
Virtual Machine Metrics
Virtual machine metrics offer visibility into the aggregate resource utilization of all virtual machines within a given region.
The following metrics are tracked today:
VM Compute Metrics
VM CPU Total: Total configured CPU allocated to all virtual machines in the region.
VM Memory Total: Total configured memory across all virtual machines in the region. The configured memory of a VM refers to the amount of memory defined in its configuration settings.
VM CPU Usage: CPU utilization across all virtual machines in this region.
VM Memory Usage (in percentage and actual value): Memory utilized across all virtual machines in the region
VM Memory allocated: Total memory allocated across all virtual machines
Number of VMs: Total number of virtual machines running in the region
CPU Throttling (percent)
VM Storage Metrics
Total Storage: Total storage across all virtual machines
Allocated Storage: Total allocated storage across all virtual machines
Used Storage: Total used storage across all virtual machines
Read Throughput: Read throughput across all virtual machines
Write Throughput: Write throughput across all virtual machines
Read IOPS: Read IOPs across all VMs
Write IOPS: Write IOPs across all VMs
VM Networking Metrics
Read Latency: Read latency across all VMs
Write Latency: Write latency across all VMs
RX throughput: Inbound traffic throughput across all VMs
TX throughput: Outbound traffic throughput across all VMs
RX Packet drop:
Dashboards
The built-in grafana instance per region includes pre-configured dashboards that display the metrics listed above.
Custom Dashboard Creation
You can create custom Grafana dashboards tailored to your specific monitoring needs.
To create a custom dashboard:
Log in to the Grafana interface through the Private Cloud Director UI.
Navigate to the Dashboard section.
Click New Dashboard.
Add panels by selecting Add Panel.
Choose visualization types and configure data sources.
Save the dashboard with a descriptive name.
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