A screenshot of a Grafana dashboard. It shows a number of stats metrics at the top, for example the number of users and buckets and the total bytes send in the interval. Below that, there are a number of time series panels, like number of operations over time, bytes send or bytes received by bucket. I will describe each individual panel and its content in detail in the main post.

Gathering Metrics from Ceph RGW S3

Wherein I set up some Prometheus metrics gathering from Ceph’s S3 RGW and build a dashboard to show the data. I like metrics. And dashboards. And plots. And one of the things I’ve been missing up to now was data from Ceph’s RadosGateway. That’s the Ceph daemon which provides an S3 (and Swift) compatible API for Ceph clusters. While Rook, the tool I’m using to deploy Ceph in my k8s cluster, already wires up Ceph’s own exporters to be scraped by a Prometheus Operator, that does not include S3 data. My main interest here is the development of bucket sizes over time, so I can see early when something is misconfigured. Up to now, the only indicator I had was the size of the pool backing the RadosGW, which currently stands at 1.42 TB, which makes it the second-largest pool in my cluster. ...

October 10, 2025 · 15 min · Michael

Configuring Mastodon Prometheus Metrics

With release 4.4.0 Mastodon introduced a Prometheus exporter. In this post, I will configure it and show the data it provides. With the new release, Mastodon provides metrics from Ruby and Sidekiq. I’ve attached examples for both to this post, see here for Ruby and here for Sidekiq. The information is not actually that interesting, it’s just generic process data. But I did find at least the Sidekiq data worth gathering. It will provide an interesting future look into my usage of Mastodon and perhaps even the activity in the Fediverse (or at least the part I’m connected to) overall. ...

July 12, 2025 · 3 min · Michael

Gathering SNMP Metrics with the SNMP Exporter

I have been gathering metrics from my DrayTek Vigor 165 modem for a while now, and finally got around to documenting the setup, so now you get to read about it. I’m using the Vigor 165 to connect to the Internet via a Deutsche Telekom 250 Mbit/s VDSL connection. That modem supports SNMP and can provide metrics like the line speed or quality. A couple of years back, I wanted to get that data into my Grafana dashboards. After some searching, I came across the SNMP Exporter. ...

May 25, 2025 · 11 min · Michael
The Thanos logo. It is a T in a square with some squares under the T. Below that is the 'Thanos' name.

Setting up Thanos for Metrics Storage

At the time of writing, I have 328 GiB of Prometheus data. When it all started, I had about 250 GiB. I could stop gathering more data whenever I like. 😅 So I’ve got a lot of Prometheus data. Especially since I started the Kubernetes cluster - or rather, since I started scraping it - I had to regularly increase the size of the storage volume for Prometheus. This might very well be due to my 5 year retention. But part of it, as it will turn out later, was because some of the things I was scraping had a 10s scrape interval configured. ...

May 18, 2025 · 30 min · Michael
A screenshot of a Grafana time series plot. It shows the time between 23:30 and 09:00 for the throughput of my Ceph cluster. It tops out at almost 100 MB, but is on average more around 65 MB. The high throughput happens between approximately 00:00 and 08:50.

Ceph: My Story of Copying 1.7 TB from one Cluster to Another

A couple of weeks ago, I migrated my Jellyfin instance to my Kubernetes cluster. This involved copying my approximately 1.7 TB worth of media from the baremetal Ceph cluster to the new Rook Ceph cluster. And I’d like to dig a bit into the metrics and try to read them like the entrails of a slain beast during a full moon at the top of a misty mountain. Just this much, the portents don’t look good for one of my HDDs. ...

March 4, 2025 · 17 min · Michael