Network Monitoring with Prometheus and Cumulus Linux

As promised in my previous article Install Prometheus and Grafana, this post is about how to monitor Cumulus Linux switches with Prometheus.

Let’s start directly by installing the Prometheus Node_Exporter:

sudo useradd --no-create-home --shell /bin/false node_exporter

tar xvf node_exporter-0.15.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo cp node_exporter-0.15.1.linux-amd64/node_exporter /usr/local/bin
sudo chown node_exporter:node_exporter /usr/local/bin/node_exporter

sudo bash -c 'cat << EOF > /etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service
[Unit]
Description=Node Exporter
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
User=node_exporter
Group=node_exporter
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/node_exporter

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF'

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start node_exporter
sudo systemctl status node_exporter

Check that the Node_Exporter service is correctly running and listing on tcp 9100 for the Prometheus server to collect the metrics from the switches:

vagrant@spine-2:~$ sudo systemctl status node_exporter
● node_exporter.service - Node Exporter
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/node_exporter.service; disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Thu 2018-03-22 13:41:26 UTC; 958ms ago
 Main PID: 5620 (node_exporter)
   CGroup: /system.slice/node_exporter.service
           └─5620 /usr/local/bin/node_exporter

Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - sockstat" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - bcache" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - hwmon" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - cpu" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - stat" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - timex" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - textfile" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - conntrack" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg=" - edac" source="node_exporter.go:52"
Mar 22 13:41:26 spine-2 node_exporter[5620]: time="2018-03-22T13:41:26Z" level=info msg="Listening on :9100" source="node_exporter.go:76"
vagrant@spine-2:~$

I created a simple dashboard in Grafana for the switches running Cumulus Linux, where you can find important metrics like throughput of the network interfaces, CPU load, Memory and disk related information:

On the top right corner you can select the switch where you want to see metrics from:

You can also have a central monitoring dashboard where all performance metrics are shown:

Here are detailed views with information about all interfaces from the different switch groups:

This is a very simple solution to monitor your Cumulus Linux switches and in combination with Cumulus NetQ enough to monitor your switch fabric.

FYI, I have used the following virtual topology BGP EVPN and VXLAN with Cumulus Linux.

Please share your feedback and leave a comment.