Prometheus on Mesosphere DC/OS

Intro

This runs Prometheus on DC/OS (1.8+). server.json contains the service definition for Prometheus itself. node_exporter.json contains the service definition for node_exporter. I'm running node_exporter inside a Mesos (cgroups) container so that it sees all of the hosts filesystems without any need for priviliges or translation.

To make life easier I also created a group.json that includes the Prometheus Server, Node Exporter, cAdvisor, Grafana Dashboard and an authentication proxy which will add Basic Auth to the Server's WebUI. The group assumes you're running Marathon-LB on your DC/OS and exports Marathon-LB labels.

To get started just install the group as shown below.

Usage

Install using

$ dcos marathon group add https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lloesche/prometheus-dcos/master/group.json
$ dcos marathon app update /prometheus/node-exporter instances=7000 # however many agents you have in your cluster

Important: Once the apps are deployed make sure to update all Environment Variables with something useful. Alternatively download group.json and modify them directly before deploying to DC/OS.

When working with the group.json you'll want to adjust the following variables and labels:

App	Variable	Value
/prometheus/server	EXTERNAL_URI	The complete URL your Prometheus Server will be reachable under (http(s)://...)
/prometheus/server	PAGERDUTY_HIGH_PRIORITY_KEY	A PagerDuty API Key for High Priority Alerts
/prometheus/server	PAGERDUTY_LOW_PRIORITY_KEY	A PagerDuty API Key for Low Priority Alerts
/prometheus/server	SMTP_FROM	Sender Address Alert Emails are send from
/prometheus/server	SMTP_TO	Recipient Address Alert Emails get send to
/prometheus/server	SMTP_SMARTHOST	SMTP Server Alert Emails are send via
/prometheus/server	SMTP_LOGIN	SMTP Server Login
/prometheus/server	SMTP_PASSWORD	SMTP Server Password
/prometheus/auth-proxy	LOGIN	Login Users have to provide when accessing Prometheus Server
/prometheus/auth-proxy	PASSWORD	Password Users have to provide when accessing Prometheus Server (following this scheme)
/prometheus/grafana	GF_SERVER_ROOT_URL	The complete URL Grafana will be reachable under
/prometheus/grafana	GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_USER	Grafana Admin Login
/prometheus/grafana	GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD	Grafana Admin Password

App	Label	Value
/prometheus/auth-proxy	HAPROXY_0_VHOST	Hostname Prometheus Server should be reachable under. This is what's contained in EXTERNAL_URI
/prometheus/grafana	HAPROXY_0_VHOST	Hostname Grafana should be reachable under. This is what's contained in GF_SERVER_ROOT_URL

Connections

Why file_sd based discovery?

Prometheus supports DNS based service discovery. Given a Mesos-DNS SRV record like _node-exporter.prometheus._tcp.marathon.mesos it will find the list of node_exporter nodes and poll them. However it'll result in instance names like

node-exporter.prometheus-6ms1y-s1.marathon.mesos:14181
node-exporter.prometheus-54eio-s0.marathon.mesos:12227
node-exporter.prometheus-1e1ow-s2.marathon.mesos:31798

which is not very useful. Also the Mesos scheduler will assign a random port resource.

So after a discussion on the mailing list it turned out that Prometheus can't relabel the instance with the node's IP address since name resolution happens after relabeling. It was suggested to use the file_sd based discovery method instead. This is what the srv2file_sd helper is for. It performs the same SRV and A record lookup and instead of the hostname writes the node's IP addres into the targets file. There's also relabeling taking place to replace the random port number with the node_exporter standard port 9100 so that when a node_exporter is restarted on a different port it's data is still associated with the same node.

Environment Variables

Variable	Function	Example
NODE_EXPORTER_SRV	Mesos-DNS SRV record of the node_exporter	NODE_EXPORTER_SRV=_node-exporter.prometheus._tcp.marathon.mesos
CADVISOR_SRV	Mesos-DNS SRV record of cadvisor	CADVISOR_SRV=_cadvisor.prometheus._tcp.marathon.mesos
SRV_REFRESH_INTERVAL (optional)	How often should we update the targets JSON	SRV_REFRESH_INTERVAL=60
ALERT_MANAGER_URI (optional)	AlertManager URL - uses buildin AlertManager if not defined	ALERT_MANAGER_URI=http://prometheusalertmanager.marathon.l4lb.thisdcos.directory:9093
PAGERDUTY_*_KEY	Pagerduty API Key for Alertmanager. Name in * will be made into the severity	PAGERDUTY_HIGH_PRIORITY_KEY=93dsqkj23gfTD_nFbdwqk
RULES (optional)	prometheus.rules, replaces the version that ships with the container image	RULES=... Entire prometheus.rules file content
EXTERNAL_URI (optional)	External WebUI URL	EXTERNAL_URI=http://prometheusserver.marathon.l4lb.thisdcos.directory:9090
SMTP_FROM	How often should we update the targets JSON	SMTP_FROM=alertmanager@example.com
SMTP_TO	How often should we update the targets JSON	SMTP_TO=ops@example.com
SMTP_SMARTHOST	How often should we update the targets JSON	SMTP_SMARTHOST=mail.example.com
SMTP_LOGIN	How often should we update the targets JSON	SMTP_LOGIN=prometheus
SMTP_PASSWORD	How often should we update the targets JSON	SMTP_PASSWORD=23iuhf23few

To produce the $RULES env variable it can be handy to use something like

$ cat prometheus.rules | sed -e ':a' -e 'N' -e '$!ba' -e 's/\n/\\n/g'

Building the SRV lookup helper

To run the srv2file_sd helper tool inside the minimal prom/prometheus Docker container I statically linked it. To do so yourself install musl libc and compile using:

$ CC=/usr/local/musl/bin/musl-gcc go build --ldflags '-linkmode external -extldflags "-static"' srv2file_sd.go

Bugs

All this was hacked up in an afternoon. Surely there's bugs. If you find any submit a PR or open an issue.

TODO

• perform A lookups in parallel instead of looping over all hosts sequentially