Lab
A Cloud Guru

Collecting Linux Server Metrics with Prometheus

Prometheus uses a pull model to periodically scrape metric data from targets. In order to collect data, you will need to set up an entity that is able to provide metric data, and then configure the Prometheus server to scrape it. In this lab, you will walk through the process of configuring Prometheus monitoring for a Linux server.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

45m

Published

Jun 12, 2020

Challenge

Install and Configure Node Exporter on the LimeDrop Web Server

Log in to the LimeDrop web server to perform the following steps.
Create a user and group that will be used to run Node Exporter:
```
sudo useradd -M -r -s /bin/false node_exporter
```

Download and extract the Node Exporter binary:

wget https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/releases/download/v0.18.1/node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz

tar xvfz node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Copy the Node Exporter binary to the appropriate location and set ownership:

sudo cp node_exporter-0.18.1.linux-amd64/node_exporter /usr/local/bin/

sudo chown node_exporter:node_exporter /usr/local/bin/node_exporter

Create a systemd unit file for Node Exporter:

sudo vi /etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service

Define the Node Exporter service in the unit file:

[Unit]
Description=Prometheus Node Exporter
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=node_exporter
Group=node_exporter
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node_exporter

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Start and enable the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl start node_exporter

sudo systemctl enable node_exporter

Test that your Node Exporter is working by making a request to it from localhost. You should get some metric data on the screen in response to this request:
```
curl localhost:9100/metrics
```

Challenge

Configure Prometheus to Scrape Metrics from the LimeDrop Web Server
1. Log in to the Prometheus server to perform the following steps.
2. Edit the Prometheus config file:
```
sudo vi /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
```
3. Locate the scrape_configs section and add a new entry under that section:
```
...

  - job_name: 'LimeDrop Web Server'
    static_configs:
    - targets: ['10.0.1.102:9100']

...
```
4. Restart Prometheus to load the new config:
```
sudo systemctl restart prometheus
```
5. Navigate to the Prometheus expression browser in your web browser using the public IP address of your Prometheus server: <PROMETHEUS_SERVER_PUBLIC_IP>:9090.
6. Run the following query to verify you are able to get some metric data from the LimeDrop web server:
```
node_filesystem_avail_bytes{job="LimeDrop Web Server"}
```

Author

A Cloud Guru

The Cloud Content team comprises subject matter experts hyper focused on services offered by the leading cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, and Azure), as well as cloud-related technologies such as Linux and DevOps. The team is thrilled to share their knowledge to help you build modern tech solutions from the ground up, secure and optimize your environments, and so much more!

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