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Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Grafana – Part XXXIV (Monitoring Runecast)

- Written in: opensource, runecast

Greetings friends, today I bring you a new post about Grafana, today I hope you like it, it is something specific, because it is about importing the so important numbers from Runecast.

It’s a 1.0 version, I have some ideas in mind about this Dashboard, but I haven’t had enough time, I think it’s good enough for now, tell me what you think.

Dashboard for Runecast

When we finish the entry we will have something similar to that Dashboard that will allow you to visualize:

Dashboard – Summary.
This first dashboard of the series, because I intend to create maybe some more with other details, etc., contains:

  • Runecast Appliance Overview – IP or FQDN of the Cluster, Version, and version definitions.
  • Runecast Issues by Severity – Number of issues by Severity.
  • Runecast Issues by Issue ID – A listing of all issues, including the Issue ID.
  • Runecast Issues by each object – A listing of all issues, including the Issue ID.

Topology with all the logical components

This entry is similar to the previous ones since in this case, we will use a combination of a shell script to collect Runecast metrics using RESTful API and InfluxDB. The design would look something like this:As we can see, the shell script will download the metrics from Runecast using the RESTful API, which will send all the data to InfluxDB, from where we can view them comfortably with Grafana.

Small system requirements before we continue

We will need two small system requirements before we continue, first will be JQ, which is a package that helps us parsing the JSON, let’s go and install it, yum install if CentOS:

apt-get install jq

Another small system requirement is to get the Runecast API Access Token, to do so, let’s go to our Runecast Console, under Settings – API Access Tokens, click in Generate API access Token:

Let’s select read-only, and that it never expires:

That’s it, ready for the next step:

Download, and configure the runecast_grafana.sh script.

We have almost everything ready, we have one last step, the script that will make all this work, we will download the latest version from the Github repository:

This shell script can be downloaded and run from the telegraf server, or influxDB, or any other Linux. We will have to edit the configuration parameters:

##
# Configurations
##
# Endpoint URL for InfluxDB
InfluxDBURL="http://YOURINFLUXSERVER" #Your InfluxDB Server, http://FQDN or https://FQDN if using SSL
InfluxDBPort="8086" #Default Port
InfluxDB="telegraf" #Default Database
InfluxDBUser="INFLUXUSER" #User for Database
InfluxDBPassword='INFLUXPASS' #Password for Database

# Endpoint URL for login action
runecastToken="RUNECASTOTKEN" #Your read-only Runecast token. You can quickly create one from the portal
runecastServer="RUNECASTFQDNORIP"

Once the changes are done, make the script executable with chmod:

chmod +x runecast_grafana.sh

We run it, and the output of the command should look something like the following, with no errors:

Writing runecast_results_analysis to InfluxDB
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Content-Type: application/json
Request-Id: 6cc3cc65-9b71-11eb-8794-0050569017a8
X-Influxdb-Build: OSS
X-Influxdb-Version: 1.8.4
X-Request-Id: 6cc3cc65-9b71-11eb-8794-0050569017a8
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2021 09:28:22 GMT

Writing runecast_results_analysis to InfluxDB
HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Content-Type: application/json
Request-Id: 6ce92985-9b71-11eb-8795-0050569017a8
X-Influxdb-Build: OSS
X-Influxdb-Version: 1.8.4
X-Request-Id: 6ce92985-9b71-11eb-8795-0050569017a8
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2021 09:28:22 GMT

If so, please now add this script to your crontab, like for example every 5minutes, I don’t think our Dashboards are updated more often, but good to download it if so:

0 */6 * * * /home/oper/runecast_grafana.sh >> /var/log/runecast.log 2>&1

We are ready to go to the next step.

Grafana Dashboards

I created a Dashboard from scratch by selecting the best requests to the database, finalizing the colors, thinking about the graphics and how to display them, and everything is automated to fit our environment without any problems and without having to edit anything manually. The Dashboard can be found here, once imported, you can use the top drop-down menus to select between Runecast, Severity, etc:

Importing the Grafana Dashboard the easy way

So you don’t have to waste hours configuring a new Dashboard, and ingesting and debugging what you want, I have already created a wonderful Dashboard with everything you need to monitor our environment in a very simple way, it will look like the image I showed you above. Select the name you want and enter the ID: 14213, which is the unique ID of the Dashboard, or the URL:

With the menus above, we can move between KB, Severity, etc.:

Please leave your comments here, or on GitHub, thanks a lot for reading!

I hope you like it, and I would like to leave you the complete series here, so you can start playing with the plugins that I have been telling you about all these years:

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