Keep your StorageGRID metrics for as long as you want by federating StorageGRIDs metrics to your own Prometheus server. StorageGRID provides a lot of notable features as one of the leading on-premises object storage solutions. It collects and maintains a trove of valuable information on the activities and health of the object store. Many of you have been asking to be able to store these metrics with longer and longer retentions. Well beyond the limits of the system today. The solution for all you data hoarders is to stand up an external Prometheus server and give it as much storage capacity as you need to meet all your retention goals. Then configure your new server to grab the metrics you want from StorageGRID. Now add Grafana on top for custom dashboards to display the metrics that you monitor and want to report on most.
Why would someone need this long timeline of stats you ask? Think of your object store like a company stock you are thinking of purchasing. You would not just want to base your decision on the last week or month of performance. You would look back at the past Years of performance to base your decision. Let us take the example of a service provider. There are a variety of workloads as well as customer growth and turnover. This makes a natural ebb and flow to the capacity and throughput usage in the short-term view. So, they want to zoom out on their stats to get a better idea of the overall trends. How many more customers and workloads can they take on before they need more compute or network infrastructure. How long can they wait for the next capacity expansion? Is it worth investing in the next tech refresh or was this whole object storage thing just a fad and it is time to pack it in.
If this sounds like a problem you are trying to solve, follow along this guide to make it happen. I will walk you through the installation and configuration of Prometheus and Grafana with StorageGRID and how to get started creating a dashboard.
You will see:
- How to grant Prometheus client access using Grid Manager
- Prepare a Linux server for Prometheus
- Install and configure Prometheus
- Install and configure Grafana
- Build a Grafana dashboard with custom panels
- How to import Grafana panels from Grid Manager
