Ansitheus

⇢ 
Tech Ansible Prometheus
Ansitheus: Ansible + Prometheus

Prometheus overview

NOTE: Checkout the Prometheus official documentation.

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring & alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud.

Features

  • a multi-dimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name & key/value pairs
  • PromQL, a flexible query language to leverage this dimensionality
  • no reliance on distributed storage; single server nodes are autonomous
  • time series collection happens via a pull model over HTTP
  • pushing time series is supported via an intermediary gateway
  • targets are discovered via service discovery or static configuration
  • multiple modes of graphing & dashboarding support

Architecture & components

Prometheus scrapes metrics from instrumented jobs, either directly or via an intermediary push gateway for short-lived jobs. It stores all scraped samples locally & runs rules over this data to either aggregate & record new time series from existing data or generate alerts. Grafana or other API consumers can be used to visualize the collected data.

  • Prometheus server: scrapes & stores time series data.
  • Prometheus alertmanager: handle alerts.
  • Special-purpose exporters.
  • Push-gateway: support short-lived jobs.
  • client libraries: instrument application code.
  • Various support tools: Grafana,…

Ansitheus

Why Ansitheus?

As you can see that, Prometheus ecosystem consists of multiple components. The operator may need a lot of efforts to configure, deploy & maintain these components. To make life easier, it is necessary to enter the world of automation, using modern tools of configuration management, provisioning & orchestration. Ansible is one of them. It is simple, agentless IT automation that anyone can use. My team decided to choose it as the automation solution, & Ansitheus is the result.

Features

The idea using Ansible to deploy Prometheus is not new. There are many existing solutions:

So what makes Ansitheus be different with others?

  • Deploy, configure & maintain the Prometheus ecosystem easily.
  • Allow users to configure, deploy the system from scratch:
    • Prepare, configure the local repository.
    • Install the necessary packages.
    • Configure Docker private registry.
    • Configure Docker daemon.
  • Containerize Prometheus components:
    • Docker is hotter than hot because it makes it possible to get far more apps running on the same old servers & it also makes it very easy to package & ship programs.
    • You can easily find the advantages of Docker & container through internet.
  • High availability with HAProxy & Keepalived.
  • Support centralized Docker logging with Fluentd.
  • Support Ansible vault to work with sensitive data.

Components

Getting started

  1. Install Ansible in deployment node.

  2. Clone this repostiory.

  3. Create configuration directory, default path /etc/ansitheus.

    sudo mkdir -p /etc/ansitheus
sudo chown $USER:$USER /etc/ansitheus

  4. Copy config.yml to /etc/ansitheus directory - this is the main configuration for Ansible monitoring tool.

    cp /path/to/ansitheus/repository/etc/ansitheus/config.yml \
    /etc/ansitheus/config.yml

  5. Copy inventory files to the current directory.

    cp /path/to/ansitheus/repository/ansible/inventory/* .

  6. Modify inventory & /etc/ansitheus/config.yml.

  7. Run tools/ansitheus, figure out yourself:

    Usage: ./tools/ansitheus COMMAND [option]

Options:
    --inventory, -i <inventory_path> Specify path to ansible inventory file
    --configdir, -c <config_path>    Specify path to directory with config.yml
    --verbose, -v                    Increase verbosity of ansible-playbook
    --tags, -t <tags>                Only run plays & tasks tagged with these values
    --help, -h                       Show this usage information
    --skip-common                    Skip common role
    --ask-vault-pass                 Ask for vault password

Commands:
    precheck                         Do pre-deployment checks for hosts
    deploy                           Deploy & start all ansitheus containers
    pull                             Pull all images for containers (only pull, no running containers)
    destroy                          Destroy Prometheus containers & service configuration
                                        --include-images to also destroy Prometheus images
                                        --include-volumes to also destroy Prometheus volumes

Contributors

  1. Kien Nguyen
  2. Dat Vu
  3. Duc Nguyen
  4. Long Cao