Find out how to use M3 to monitor your systems, and Grafana to make the results easier to understand.
Lorna Mitchell
|RSS FeedDeveloper Advocate at Aiven
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One key use case for Aiven for M3 is for handling the monitoring data from other systems. In this post you will do just that, by setting up a PostgreSQL service and collecting metrics from it using M3. To complete the picture, Grafana will be used to inspect the collected data.
To begin with, you need a PostgreSQL service. It doesn't matter what you choose here since this service isn't going to do any important work – it's merely a temporary container for some metrics (sorry, PostgreSQL!).
With a PostgreSQL service running, you can start to collect metrics from it.
From the PostgreSQL service overview page, configure the metrics integration with a new M3 service:
The metrics collected from PostgreSQL are now being sent to M3.
The next step is to add the dashboard integration so you can see the data you are collecting. From the M3 service overview page, let's set up a Grafana dashboard:
Once created, you can access Grafana by opening its Service URI in a new browser tab, and logging in with the user and password listed on the service overview page. To get you started, Aiven includes a default dashboard that shows some of the most common metrics.
To access the pre-built dashboard:
You now have a clear view of your PostgreSQL database health.
Click the dashboard settings, and choose "Save As" to use this dashboard as a template for your own that you can modify.
The list of PostgreSQL metrics exposed to Grafana gives more information about the fields that are available.
The integrations are now in place, and you can see both the data coming in and the dashboard integration from the M3 service overview page.
Following the same approach, you can add metrics integrations to all of your other Aiven services, and send data to the M3 database you created. You can also write metrics from non-Aiven services to M3 to bring all the data you need into one place, and to visualize it with Grafana.
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