Edge device (e.g. raspberry pi) monitoring based on Telegraf, Influxdb and Grafana

Project help
1

Hi,

I am glad to share the following composite docker application

This application can be used to monitor the system resources of a device based on the arm architecture (e.g. raspberry pi).

Rationale for this application
I am planning to run multiple services on a single raspberry pi as a multi container application using Balena. For this I would like to be able to check if the raspberry has sufficient resources (memory, cpu, disk) to run all these services. So therefore I have created as a start this monitoring application which I will then gradually extend with other services while keeping a close eye on the system metrics dashboard.

Here an example of the system metrics dashboard provided by this application:

system_metrics_dashboard
system_metrics_dashboard.png1709Ă—1974 277 KB

Note that this is the first version of this application and I am well aware that it has many short comings. So I will welcome all feedback. Also any issues (for features or defects) you report in my github repository will be more than appreciated.

Jan.

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2

I have extended my github project with nginx that acts as reverse proxy server. It is currently mapping http/https requests to port 30000 (= port used by grafana UI).

This version of the repository is tagged in github with v1.01
The previous working version (see above post) without nginx is tagged with v1.00

Note that in the mean time this github repository has been extended with many containers (Node-RED, mqtt) and consequently I have also renamed this repository from balena-edge-device-monitoring into balena-node-red-mqtt-nginx-TIG-stack.

3

@janvda thanks for sharing your work! I’m a big fan of Grafana dashboards :grin:

4

Hey everyone,

After more than one year since the thread was active and with the recent deployments of balena analytics, @chrisys would you say that there is a need or use for 3rd party analytics, such as Grafana or netdata?

Will be deploying it myself for further testing.

Cheers!

5

Hi, could you clarify what feature or project you are referring to when you say “the recent deployments of balena analytics” ?

1 Like
7

@lucianbuzzo thanks for replying!

I am referring to the fact that the balena dashboard offers the ability to periodically get analytics regarding the device. I want to see if there is value in attempting to integrate netdata and balena and sharing the results.

btw, netdata docker configuration has these requirements:

security_opt:
      - apparmor:unconfined
    volumes:
      - /etc/passwd:/host/etc/passwd:ro
      - /etc/group:/host/etc/group:ro
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - /sys:/host/sys:ro

Which I am not sure whether they can be supported by balena, any advice or tip is more than welcome.

thanks!

8

I don’t think bind mounting /proc, /etc and /sys from the host to a container is possible.
You can still try running netdata as a privileged container to see if it shows some interesting information.

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10

Is there any documentation regarding the “privileged” flag and what it enables?

Maybe we could monkey patch netdata, how about installing it directly into the hostOS?

As always, thanks for your time man :slight_smile:

11

From the Docker dpcs:

When the operator executes docker run --privileged, Docker will enable access to all devices on the host as well as set some configuration in AppArmor or SELinux to allow the container nearly all the same access to the host as processes running outside containers on the host.

You won’t be able to install things in the host OS as it is read only.
I’d try running it without patching to see what it shows.

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*docs

1 Like
14

Hey Zvin,

As soon as I have access to devices, I will be testing it myself (Thursday Morning). I though privileged was a balena flag and wasn’t aware of it’s existence in the docker.

Maybe use a custom app which uses dbus to serve as a pipe towards the needed files? (just throwing ideas, not sure even if it’s feasible).

thanks!