Overview

The Weka GUI allows monitoring basic information of the CPUs, Network, Drives, IOPS/Throughput, and more advanced information via the statistics as well as Weka Alerts and the Weka Events log.

It is sometimes useful to use external tools like Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring. It could be that you already have them in the environment and would like to correlate with other products and see all information on the same dashboard.

In this guide, we will learn how to easily set-up a nice Grafana dashboard to monitor Weka. We will use a custom Prometheus client that presents weka statistics.

It is advisable to set-up a machine (or a VM) to run the external services used if you do not already have those running in the environment.

The easiest way to set up a Grafana environment is with Docker. For that, make sure docker-ce and docker-compose are installed on that machine. Installation instructions for installing Docker are on the Docker website.

Setting up the Weka-mon package

Step 1: Install the Weka-mon package

The package resides on GitHub. There are two ways you can pull it from GitHub - either download a Release or clone the repository.

To download a Release, go to https://github.com/weka/weka-mon/releases in your web browser, and select the latest release. Click on the "Source Code" link to download. Copy this to your intended management server or VM and unpack it.

Alternatively, to clone the repository, run the following commands to pull the weka-mon package from GitHub:

# Clone the package from github:
git clone https://github.com/weka/weka-mon
cd weka-mon
​

Step 2: Run the install.sh script:

The install.sh script creates some directories and sets the permissions on them:

# Set up the package
./install.sh
​

Step 3: Set your CLUSTER_SPEC

With docker-compose, we give the ClusterSpec (see the ClusterSpecs section for details) by setting the environment variable, CLUSTER_SPEC. The export tool can monitor multiple clusters, so it can take multiple ClusterSpecs via the CLUSTER_SPEC variable.

The general format of the CLUSTER_SPEC variable is <ClusterSpec> <ClusterSpec> [...], meaning a space-separated list of ClusterSpecs.

Here is an example:

# example CLUSTER_SPEC
export CLUSTER_SPEC="weka1,weka2,weka3:~/.weka/prod tweka1,tweka2:~/.weka/test"
​

Step 4: Edit the export.yml file (optional)

The export.yml configuration file is pre-set to provide the information on the provided Grafana panels, so there is no need to edit it unless you're adding panels to the Grafana Dashboards. The export.yml file can be found in the base of the weka-mon directory hierarchy.

To edit the file, do not add or delete any lines; all the configurable items are already in there but commented out with a #. To enable collecting data for these additional metrics, just uncomment them.

For example, below is a snippet of the export.yml. To enable collecting the FILEATOMICOPEN_OPS statistic, remove the # character at the beginning of the line. Note that if the statistic you wish to gather is in a Category that is commented out, you will need to uncomment the Category line as well if it is not already uncommented (the first line in the example below). Conversely, to stop collecting a statistic, comment out the statistic by inserting a # at the beginning of the line.

 'ops_driver':     # Category
   'DIRECT_READ_SIZES':  'sizes'
   'DIRECT_WRITE_SIZES':  'sizes'
#   'FILEATOMICOPEN_LATENCY':  'microsecs'
#   'FILEATOMICOPEN_OPS':  'ops'
​

Step 5: Start the containers

To start the containers with docker-compose, run the following command:

docker-compose up -d
​

That's it! Grafana should appear on port 3000 on the server running the docker containers. The default credentials for Grafana are admin/admin.

Integrating with an existing Grafana/Prometheus environment

If you already have Grafana and Prometheus running in your environment, you only need to run the exporter and add it to the Prometheus configuration.

Step 1: Install the Weka-mon package

Follow the instructions appearing in the above Install the Weka-mon package section.

Step 2: Import the dashboards

The dashboard JSON files are in the subdirectory weka-mon/var_lib_grafana/dashboards. Please follow the Grafana documentation on how to import the files.

Step 3: Edit the export.yml (optional)

Follow the instructions appearing in the above Edit the export.yml file section.

Step 4: Run the exporter

You can run the exporter in a number of ways - as a Docker container, as a compiled binary, or as a Python script. The Docker container is easy, but if you don't want or don't have Docker, you can run the binary directly. Running the Python scripts directly is also an option, but will require installing some Python Modules from PyPi.

In order to run the exporter, you will need a CLUSTER_SPEC (as defined above).

Perform one of the next 3 steps - 4a, 4b, or 4c:

Step 4a: Getting and running the container

Get and run the container. The only required command-line argument is at least one ClusterSpec (see Set your CLUSTER_SPEC section for details), so it knows where your cluster is. You may specify more than one ClusterSpec - it takes a comma-separated list of ClusterSpecs on the command line.

The below example maps in several volumes: the ~/.weka directory (so the container can read the auth file), /dev/log so it can put entries in the Syslog, /etc/hosts so it has some name resolution (you can also use DNS if your Docker environment is set up to do so), and finally mapping the config file (export.yml) into the container.

There are other options, and you can run the command with --help or -h for a full description.

# get the container from dockerhub:
docker pull wekasolutions/export
​
# example of how to run the container
docker run -d --network=host \
  --mount type=bind,source=/root/.weka/,target=/weka/.weka/ \
  --mount type=bind,source=/dev/log,target=/dev/log \
  --mount type=bind,source=/etc/hosts,target=/etc/hosts \
  --mount type=bind,source=$PWD/export.yml,target=/weka/export.yml \
  wekasolutions/export -vv weka01,weka02,weka09:~/.weka/myauthfile
  

Step 4b: Getting the binary version

Go to https://github.com/weka/export/releases and download the tarball from the latest release. As of time of this last doc update, the current version is 1.0.2, so download the export-1.0.2.tar file from the Version-1.0.2 release. Copy this file to your management server or VM.

Then, run the exporter (see above for an explanation of the command-line arguments):

tar xvf export-1.0.2.tar
cd export
./export -vv weka01,weka02,weka09:~/.weka/myauthfile
​

Step 4c: Getting the sources

You can either git clone https://github.com/weka/export or go to https://github.com/weka/export/releases and download the source tarball.

After cloning or unpacking the tarball, you will need to run pip3 install -r requirements.txt command to install all the required python modules.

Then, run the exporter (see above for an explanation of the command-line arguments):

./export -vv weka01,weka02,weka09:~/.weka/myauthfile
​