Petabridge.Monitoring.PCF

A monitoring engine for .NET applications running on Pivotal's Cloud Foundry (PCF) platform.

This component targets the PCF Metrics Forwarder, an HTTP API that can be used to inject metrics directly into the PCF loggregator stream. Any metrics recorded by this component will be directly visible inside PCF's built-in PCF Metrics application.

Petabridge.Monitoring.PCF supports the following types of metrics:

1. Counters - used for measuring throughput or frequency per second;
2. Gauges - used to measure values over time (i.e. changes in the size of a queue length or size of message); and
3. Timings - used to measure durations measured in milliseconds.

The PCF Metrics Forwarder only natively supports gauges, so this driver does some work under the covers to adapt the other metrics types on your behalf.

We developed this driver to support our customers who are running .NET applications on PCF and intend on supporting this driver perpetually. It is licensed under Apache 2.0.

This driver is built to be extremely memory-efficient, thread-safe, and highly concurrent - it's powered by Akka.NET actors under the hood.

Quickstart

To get started with Petabridge.Monitoring.PCF, install the following NuGet package:

PS> Install-Package Petabridge.Monitoring.PCF

And then create an instance of the PcfMetricsRecorder class:

var metrics = PcfMetricRecorder.Create();
metrics.IncrementCounter("http.serv"); // record a counter (increment by 1)
metrics.IncrementCounter("http.serv");

Typically you don't need to explicitly pass in any configuration elements for the PcfMetricRecorder to work correctly. We're able to extract all of the necessary credentials and authentication information from the PcfEnvironment class defined inside the Akka.Bootstrap.PCF package, which we take as a dependency.

Integrating with Akka.NET

If you're intending on using PCF alongside Akka.NET and you want Petabridge.Monitoring.PCF to leverage your pre-existing ActorSystem instead of creating a new one, you can adjust the call to PcfMetricsRecorder.Create accordingly:

var mySys = ActorSystem.Create("foo"); // your ActorSystem
var metrics = PcfMetricsRecorder.Create(mySys);

This will cause the PcfMetricsRecorder to hook its reporting infrastructure into your ActorSystem instead of creating its own.

Trying out Petabridge.Monitoring.PCF on PCF

If you want to try this solution out on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, this solution ships with a PCF manifest and a basic demo web application that are ready for deployment on PCF immediately.

If you have the PCF CLI installed:

• Install the PCF Metrics Forwarder and make it available in the space you'll be using for deployment;
• clone this repository;
• edit the manifest.yml file to include your application settings. Specifically, you'll want to edit the services section to include the name of your PCF Metrics Forwarder service.

And then execute the following command:

PS> cf push pcf-akka-demo -b https://github.com/cloudfoundry/dotnet-core-buildpack.git

Once the deployment goes through, if you click around on the web application a couple of times you should see some metrics show up inside PCF Metrics under the heads http.serv.count and http.serv.duration, a counter and a timer respectively.

Building this solution

To run the build script associated with this solution, execute the following:

Windows

c:\> build.cmd all

Linux / OS X

c:\> build.sh all

If you need any information on the supported commands, please execute the build.[cmd|sh] help command.

This build script is powered by FAKE; please see their API documentation should you need to make any changes to the build.fsx file.

Previewing Documentation

To preview the documentation for this project, execute the following command at the root of this folder:

C:\> serve-docs.cmd

This will use the built-in docfx.console binary that is installed as part of the NuGet restore process from executing any of the usual build.cmd or build.sh steps to preview the fully-rendered documentation. For best results, do this immediately after calling build.cmd buildRelease.

Release Notes, Version Numbers, Etc

This project will automatically populate its release notes in all of its modules via the entries written inside RELEASE_NOTES.md and will automatically update the versions of all assemblies and NuGet packages via the metadata included inside common.props.

If you add any new projects to the solution created with this template, be sure to add the following line to each one of them in order to ensure that you can take advantage of common.props for standardization purposes:

<Import Project="..\common.props" />

This library is maintained by Petabridge®. Copyright 2018.