svn commit: r49807 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status

Mon Jan 9 00:14:14 UTC 2017

Author: bjk
Date: Mon Jan  9 00:14:12 2017
New Revision: 49807
URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/49807

Log:
  Add Prometheus entry from ed

Modified:
  head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2016-10-2016-12.xml

Modified: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2016-10-2016-12.xml
==============================================================================

--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2016-10-2016-12.xml	Sun Jan  8 23:49:54 2017	(r49806)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/news/status/report-2016-10-2016-12.xml	Mon Jan  9 00:14:12 2017	(r49807)
@@ -151,4 +151,81 @@
 	(NFS-as-a-service).</task>
     </help>
   </project>
+
+  <project cat='proj'>
+    <title>Sysctl Exporter for Prometheus</title>
+
+    <contact>
+      <person>
+	<name>
+	  <given>Ed</given>
+	  <common>Schouten</common>
+	</name>
+	<email>ed at FreeBSD.org</email>
+      </person>
+    </contact>
+
+    <links>
+      <url href="https://prometheus.io/">The Prometheus Project</url>
+      <url href="https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter">Node Exporter</url>
+      <url href="https://svnweb.FreeBSD.org/base/head/usr.sbin/prometheus_sysctl_exporter/">Sysctl Exporter</url>
+    </links>
+
+    <body>
+      <p>Prometheus is an Open Source monitoring system that was
+	originally built at SoundCloud in 2012.  Since 2016, this project is
+	part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, together with other
+	projects like Kubernetes.</p>
+
+      <p>Prometheus scrapes its targets by periodically sending HTTP GET
+	requests.  Targets then respond by sending key-value pairs of metrics
+	and their sample value.  Prometheus has a query language, PromQL,
+	that can be used to aggregate sample values and specify alerting
+	conditions.  Tools like Grafana can be used to create fancy
+	dashboards using such queries.</p>
+
+      <p>The Prometheus project provides a utility called the
+	node_exporter that gathers basic system metrics and serves them
+	over HTTP.  This utility tends to be rather complex, as it has
+	to extract metrics from many different sources.  On Linux, files
+	in <tt>/proc</tt> have no uniform format, meaning that for every
+	kernel framework a custom collector needs to be written.</p>
+
+      <p>On &os; the sitiuation is better, as the data exported
+	through <tt>sysctl</tt> is already structured in such a way that
+	it can easily be translated to Prometheus' metrics format.  The
+	goal of this project is thus to provide a generic exporter for
+	the entire sysctl tree.  Not only does this prevent unnecessary
+	bloat and indirection, it may also make the life of a kernel
+	developer a lot easier.  One can easily use Prometheus to graph
+	the occurrence of an event over time by (temporarily) adding a
+	counter to the kernel.</p>
+
+      <p>An initial version of the sysctl exporter has been integrated
+	into the &os; base system in December.  It can be run through
+	<tt>inetd</tt> by uncommenting the example provided in
+	<tt>inetd.conf</tt>.  Unfortunately, this exporter cannot be
+	merged back to &os; 10.x/11.x, as it depends on KBI-breaking
+	changes to <tt>sysctl(9)</tt>.</p>
+    </body>
+
+    <help>
+      <task>Are you using Prometheus or are you interested in using
+	it?  Be sure to give both Prometheus and this <tt>sysctl</tt>
+	exporter a try!</task>
+
+      <task>It would be nice if we created a set of useful alerting
+	rules and placed those in /usr/share/examples.  For example, how
+	can one use this exporter to monitor the state of GEOM-based
+	RAID arrays?  Is such information even exported through
+	<tt>sysctl</tt>?</task>
+
+      <task>Prometheus uses a pretty nifty format for exporting
+	histograms.  Histograms are useful for expressing the amount of
+	time taken to complete certain events (for example, disk
+	operations).  Would it be possible to add histograms as native
+	datatypes to sysctl?  If so, is there any chance they can be
+	implemented without picking up any kernel locks?</task>
+    </help>
+  </project>
 </report>
