Prometheus

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. ...

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. ...

I had to clean up my Prometheus data, and it got pretty darned close there. When it comes to my metrics, I’m very much a data hoarder. Metrics gathering was what got me into Homelabbing as a hobby, instead of just a means to an end. Telegraf/Influx/Grafana were the first new services on my Homeserver in about five years. And I really do like looking at my dashboards, including looking at past data. My retention period currently is five years. And I’m already pretty sure that when I come up to those five years for the initial data, I will just extend that to 10 years. 😅 ...

Wherein I set up Prometheus for metrics gathering in the k8s cluster. This is part 10 of my k8s migration series. Let me tell you something about me: I love metrics. And pretty charts. The more the better. Back in 2020, setting up Prometheus+Grafana was what brought me to Homelabbing as a hobby, instead of just a means to an end, running some services I wanted to use. I had just gotten an updated ISP connection and found my old FritzBox not working anymore. Instead of just buying a newer one, I decided to try out OPNsense. This meant that I now had two hosts in the Homelab. My old home server running a handful of services, and the new OPNsense box. And I wanted metrics, especially about CPU and network usage. ...

I’ve long been wondering how much power my Homelab consumes, especially with my switch from a single relatively beefy server to a gaggle of Raspberry Pis. In the end, I put in three smart plugs supporting MQTT. I would have loved to have per-machine power consumption stats, but I didn’t want to invest that much money into smart plugs. To wet your appetite a bit, here is a snapshot of the resulting Grafana dashboard: ...