Fluo metrics in Grafana

Fluo is instrumented using dropwizard metrics which allows Fluo to be configured to send metrics to multiple metrics tools (such as Graphite, Ganglia, etc).

This document describes how to send Fluo metrics to InfluxDB, a time series database, and make them viewable in Grafana, a visualization tool. If you want general information on metrics, see the Fluo metrics documentation.

Set up Grafana/InfluxDB using fluo-dev

The easiest way to view the metrics coming from Fluo is to use fluo-dev which can be configured to setup InfluxDB and Grafana as well have Fluo send data to them. Fluo-dev will also set up a Fluo dashboard in Grafana.

Set up Grafana/InfluxDB on your own

If cannot use fluo-dev, you can follow the instructions below to setup InfluxDB and Grafana on your own.

Follow the standard installation instructions for InfluxDB and Grafana. As for versions, the instructions below were written using InfluxDB v0.9.4.2 and Grafana v2.5.0.

Add the following to your InfluxDB configuration to configure it accept metrics in Graphite format from Fluo. The configuration below contains templates that transform the Graphite metrics into a format that is usable in InfluxDB.

[[graphite]]
  bind-address = ":2003"
  enabled = true
  database = "fluo_metrics"
  protocol = "tcp"
  consistency-level = "one"
  separator = "_"
  batch-size = 1000
  batch-pending = 5
  batch-timeout = "1s"
  templates = [
    "io.fluo.*.*.tx.*.*.* ..app.host.measurement.measurement.observer.field",
    "io.fluo.*.*.*.*.* ..app.host.measurement.measurement.field",
    "io.fluo.*.*.*.* ..app.host.measurement.measurement",
  ]

Configure fluo.properties in your Fluo app configuration to send Graphite metrics to InfluxDB. Below is example configuration. Remember to replace <INFLUXDB_HOST> with the actual host.

 io.fluo.metrics.reporter.graphite.enable=true
 io.fluo.metrics.reporter.graphite.host=<INFLUXDB_HOST>
 io.fluo.metrics.reporter.graphite.port=2003
 io.fluo.metrics.reporter.graphite.frequency=10

Grafana needs to be configured to load dashboard JSON templates from a directory. Fluo distributes a Grafana dashboard template in its tarball distribution that is located in the directory contrib/grafana. Before restarting Grafana, you should copy the template from your Fluo installation to you the dashboards/ directory configured below.
```
[dashboards.json]
enabled = true
path = <GRAFANA_HOME>/dashboards
```
If you restart Grafana, you will see the Fluo dashboard configured but all of its charts will be empty unless you have a Fluo application running and configured to send data to InfluxDB. When you start sending data, you may need to refresh the dashboard page in the browser to start viewing metrics.