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Ceramic Stats

Metrics are gathered from direct instrumentation via OTLP, from AWS custom metrics and Loki/Promtail log analyzers

Dashboards

Instrumentation with OTLP

This pattern will work for any node deployed in the 3box VPC. (in the future we may have a libp2p based solution that can work outside our VPC...but not yet)

Collector-to-Prometheus Architecture

The Collector architecture was settled on because of the need to support ephemeral workers that cannot be scraped.

Naming Conventions

Metrics are named according to the pattern [service]_[mode]_[label]_[?suffix]. Some examples:

Metric Label Interpretation
cas_server_pin_failed Count of "pin_failed" occurrences in CAS server
cas_anchor_anchor_success Count of "anchor_success" occurrences in CAS anchor workers
js_ceramic_stream_pinned_total Count of "stream_pinned" occurrences in Ceramic nodes (on 3box VPC)
js_ceramic_stream_pinned_total Count of "stream_pinned" occurrences in Ceramic nodes (on 3box VPC)
agent_model_cum_uniq_sum Running sum of measurements of the "model_cum_uniq" metric, or the number of unique models seen
agent_model_cum_uniq_count Running count of measurements of the "model_cum_uniq" metric, or the number of unique models seen

Simple count metrics may have no suffix, or may have _total suffix. Histogram metrics will generally have _sum, _count and _bucket suffixes. For histograms, to have a meaningful value of the metric you will generally divide _sum/_count.

In grafana you may use the PromQL syntax to group, sum, observe rate or increase, or otherwise manipulate the raw metric values to derive meaningful values. These may be further used to set alerts directly in Grafana.

You may explore existing metrics directly on the prometheus endpoints

- [Prometheus Clay](https://ceramic-tnet-grafana-prometheus-1025868463.us-east-2.elb.amazonaws.com/graph)
- [Prometheus Dev](https://ceramic-dev-grafana-prometheus-1015087063.us-east-2.elb.amazonaws.com/graph)
- [Prometheus Prod](https://ceramic-prod-grafana-prometheus-356470995.us-east-2.elb.amazonaws.com/graph)

Or examine them from the Sandbox dashboard

image

Instrumenting a Project

To add metrics a new project, install the @ceramicnetwork/observability package (repo). You will specify the service name when you call start to start the metrics collection. Note that the collector host must also be passed as a parameter and must be reachable from your new deployment on the VPC. Search for COLLECTOR_HOST in the ceramic-infra repo to see examples of how this is set.

In most cases, however, your project will already have the observability package included, and all you will need to do is to use it.

Ceramic nodes (js-ceramic)

To add metrics to js-ceramic 3box nodes, simply add the line

import {ServiceMetrics as Metrics} from '@ceramicnetwork/observability'

to the file if it is not already present, define your metric names as constants at the top of the file, and add a line such as

Metrics.count(YOUR_METRIC_LABEL, 1)

to count occurances of a thing. After deployment, you can find the corresponding metric in grafana under js_ceramic_YOUR_METRIC_LABEL. If you wish to include additional dimensions, you can freely invent useful dimensions such as return status etc. These will be available to you for grouping in PromQL when creating a chart in grafana.

Metrics.count(YOUR_METRIC_LABEL, 1, {'outcome': 'good'}

Just be careful, that the cardinality of your dimensions is not too high - do not use unique identifiers as dimension values! Similarly avoid using variables as metric labels, as we do not want a profusion of metrics. It is also possible to use observable gauge (values that go up and down, rather than accumulate) and histograms, just by changing the function called:

Metrics.observe(TEMPERATURE_OR_SOMETHING, 98.7, {'other_symptoms':'headache'})

Metrics.record(LATENCY_MS, 1878)

CAS

To avoid duplication, please add your CAS metric labels to the settings file in the enum METRIC_NAMES

Then in your code, import METRIC_NAMES along with observability, and record metrics like so:

Metrics.count(METRIC_NAMES.SCHEDULER_TASK_UNCAUGHT_ERROR, 1)

For processes that require simple timing, you can use the TimeableMetric construction. For more advanced tracing, we should implement the trace capability, which is currently still tbd.

Viewing your new Metric

In order to edit the Grafana dashboards, you will need to retrieve the login credentials from 1Password. If you do not have access to any credentials for "grafana" please ask your manager

Between PromQL, Grafana transformations and display options, it is possible to achieve customized views, such as the following:

imageimage

Each deployment of Grafana has a Sandbox area where you can create a new panel to inspect your metrics. Use 'Prometheus' as the data source and find your metric from the dropdown menu.

Generally, most count type metrics will use a rate() function to display. See PromQL syntax for how to create queries, or examine the existing panels using the 'Edit' dropdown.

See the existing dashboards for examples of PromQL syntax for common purposes. Generally 'count' metrics will be combined with 'rate', 'observe' metrics may be charted raw, and 'record' metrics are combined with 'histogram_quantile' using the autogenerated metric that ends with _bucket.

Note due to some javascript flukes in grafana, it is usually necessary to compose your query separately and replace the dashboard query in one go, rather than trying to edit it within the dashboard. Trying to edit locally often results in an error such as

image

whereas the same metric pasted all at once, may work fine.

Once you have the panel behaving in the desired way, please add to one of the main Grafana dashboards, or create your own. When creating a new dashboard it should go into one of the following folders: Adoption, Performance, Product, or General

image

If you would like your new dashboard to be checked into git and propagated from prod -> clay, qa and dev, add it to the appropriate section of https://github.com/3box/ceramic-stats/blob/dev/grafana/src/push-boards.py and run this script with the Grafana API key in your environment. This way we can tweak the dashboards freely using grafana and check them in after being satisfied with the result. Note that the prometheus driven dashboards are not provisioned (so are not overwritten on deploy). Find the Grafana API keys in 1password.

Creating an Alert

You may add an alert on any query, using the "Alert" tab.

image

Try to pick a threshold that will not create excessive false positives. The "No data" handling should be set to "Keep last state" to avoid sending excessive alerts when no data is generated or available for network or other reasons. (we can have one specific alert about connectivity, but we don't need all the alerts firing).

List of Production alerts


About Loki/Promtail

This package is designed to visualize log-derived data in Grafana. Promtail pulls and labels Ceramic logs then pushes them to Loki, a log aggregation system built for Grafana. Several existing metrics are produced in this way. New metrics should be added via direct instrumentation if possible.

diagram

Installation

Each component in this package runs in a Docker container (but can also be run natively on your system by downloading the binaries).

Install and run Ceramic (and optionally Ceramic Anchor Service)

Pull the docker images

Quick Setup (Recommended)

docker-compose up --abort-on-container-exit

If you'd like to run the containers in the background, note that you must check for startup failures yourself

docker-compose up -d

Manual Setup

without Docker compose

You can build the images in this repo or run the images provided by the Grafana team for their default configuration.

Run Loki

docker run \
-v $(pwd):/mnt/config \
-p 3100:3100 \
grafana/loki:2.0.0 \
-config.file=/mnt/config/loki-config.yaml

Check its status http://localhost:3100/ready and start Promtail when it's ready

Run Promtail

The command below attaches volumes to pull the config file and logs. It assumes your Ceramic logs are stored in this directory at ./ceramic and ./cas. The easiest way to get logs here is to symlink them:

ln -s ~/path/to/js-ceramic/packages/cli/logs ./ceramic
ln -s ~/path/to/ceramic-anchor-service/logs ./cas

Then run the image

docker run \
-v $(pwd):/mnt/config \
-v $(pwd)/ceramic:/var/log/ceramic \
-v $(pwd)/cas:/var/log/cas \
grafana/promtail:2.0.0 \
-config.file=/mnt/config/promtail-config.yaml \
-log.level debug

Run Grafana

docker run -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana

Usage

Now that the services are running you can, login to Grafana at http://localhost:3000 with u: admin p: admin

Contributing

We are happy to accept small and large contributions. Make sure to check out the Ceramic specifications for details of how the protocol works.

Troubleshooting

If a workflow step fails on push, force a retry by making a trivial change (like to this README)

License

Apache 2.0

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Grafana stack to monitor Ceramic nodes

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