Monitor infrastructure

Grafana integrations

Integrations reference

Memcached

Grafana Cloud

Memcached integration for Grafana Cloud

Memcached is a distributed, in-memory key-value store used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching information in memory.

This integration includes 4 useful alerts and 1 pre-built dashboard to help monitor and visualize Memcached metrics.

Before you begin

This integration relies on Grafana Alloy installed along Memcached node. See the following sections for details.

Install Memcached integration for Grafana Cloud

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
Find Memcached and click its tile to open the integration.
Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send Memcached metrics to your Grafana Cloud instance.
Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboard and alerts to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your Memcached setup.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Alloy

Simple mode

These snippets are configured to scrape a single Memcached instance running locally with default ports.

First, manually copy and append the following snippets into your alloy configuration file.

Integrations snippets

prometheus.exporter.memcached "integrations_memcached_exporter" { }

discovery.relabel "integrations_memcached_exporter" {
	targets = prometheus.exporter.memcached.integrations_memcached_exporter.targets

	rule {
		target_label = "instance"
		replacement  = constants.hostname
	}

	rule {
		target_label = "job"
		replacement  = "integrations/memcached_exporter"
	}
}

prometheus.scrape "integrations_memcached_exporter" {
	targets    = discovery.relabel.integrations_memcached_exporter.output
	forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.metrics_service.receiver]
	job_name   = "integrations/memcached_exporter"
}

Advanced mode

The following snippets provide examples to guide you through the configuration process.

To instruct Grafana Alloy to scrape your Memcached instances, manually copy and append the snippets to your alloy configuration file, then follow subsequent instructions.

Advanced integrations snippets

prometheus.exporter.memcached "integrations_memcached_exporter" { }

discovery.relabel "integrations_memcached_exporter" {
	targets = prometheus.exporter.memcached.integrations_memcached_exporter.targets

	rule {
		target_label = "instance"
		replacement  = constants.hostname
	}

	rule {
		target_label = "job"
		replacement  = "integrations/memcached_exporter"
	}
}

prometheus.scrape "integrations_memcached_exporter" {
	targets    = discovery.relabel.integrations_memcached_exporter.output
	forward_to = [prometheus.remote_write.metrics_service.receiver]
	job_name   = "integrations/memcached_exporter"
}

This integrations uses the prometheus.exporter.memcached component to generate metrics from a Memcached instance.

For the full array of configuration options, refer to the prometheus.exporter.memcached component reference documentation.

This exporter must be linked with a discovery.relabel component to apply the necessary relabelings.

For each Memcached instance to be monitored you must create a pair of these components.

Configure the following properties within each discovery.relabel component:

instance label: constants.hostname sets the instance label to your Grafana Alloy server hostname. If that is not suitable, change it to a value uniquely identifies this Memcached instance.

You can then scrape them by including each discovery.relabel under targets within the prometheus.scrape component.

Grafana Agent static configuration (deprecated)

The following section shows configuration for running Grafana Agent in static mode which is deprecated. You should use Grafana Alloy for all new deployments.

Before you begin

This integration relies on Grafana Agent installed along Memcached node. See the following sections for details.

Install Memcached integration for Grafana Cloud

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
Find Memcached and click its tile to open the integration.
Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send Memcached metrics to your Grafana Cloud instance.
Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboard and alerts to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your Memcached setup.

Post-install configuration for the Memcached integration

This integration is configured to work with the memcached_exporter, which is embedded in Grafana Agent.

Enable the integration by adding provided snippet to your agent configuration file.

Make sure to change the memcached_address to the address of the memcached server you want to monitor.

For a full description of configuration options see how to configure the memcached_exporter_config block in the agent documentation.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Agent

Below integrations, insert the following lines and change the URLs according to your environment:

  memcached_exporter:
    enabled: true
    memcached_address: localhost:11211
    instance: '<your-instance-name>'

Full example configuration for Grafana Agent

Refer to the following Grafana Agent configuration for a complete example that contains all the snippets used for the Memcached integration. This example also includes metrics that are sent to monitor your Grafana Agent instance.

integrations:
  prometheus_remote_write:
  - basic_auth:
      password: <your_prom_pass>
      username: <your_prom_user>
    url: <your_prom_url>
  agent:
    enabled: true
    relabel_configs:
    - action: replace
      source_labels:
      - agent_hostname
      target_label: instance
    - action: replace
      target_label: job
      replacement: "integrations/agent-check"
    metric_relabel_configs:
    - action: keep
      regex: (prometheus_target_sync_length_seconds_sum|prometheus_target_scrapes_.*|prometheus_target_interval.*|prometheus_sd_discovered_targets|agent_build.*|agent_wal_samples_appended_total|process_start_time_seconds)
      source_labels:
      - __name__
  # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `integrations` section.
  # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
  memcached_exporter:
    enabled: true
    memcached_address: localhost:11211
    instance: '<your-instance-name>'
logs:
  configs:
  - clients:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_loki_pass>
        username: <your_loki_user>
      url: <your_loki_url>
    name: integrations
    positions:
      filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `logs.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
metrics:
  configs:
  - name: integrations
    remote_write:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_prom_pass>
        username: <your_prom_user>
      url: <your_prom_url>
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `metrics.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
  global:
    scrape_interval: 60s
  wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-wal

Dashboards

The Memcached integration installs the following dashboards in your Grafana Cloud instance to help monitor your system.

Memcached Overview

Memcached overview

Alerts

The Memcached integration includes the following useful alerts:

Alert	Description
MemcachedDown	Critical: Memcached instance is down.
MemcachedConnectionLimitApproaching	Warning: Memcached max connection limit is approaching.
MemcachedConnectionLimitApproaching	Critical: Memcached connections at critical level.
MemcachedOutOfMemoryErrors	Warning: Memcached has OutOfMemory errors.

Metrics

The most important metrics provided by the Memcached integration, which are used on the pre-built dashboard and Prometheus alerts, are as follows:

memcached_commands_total
memcached_connections_total
memcached_current_bytes
memcached_current_connections
memcached_current_items
memcached_items_evicted_total
memcached_items_total
memcached_max_connections
memcached_process_system_cpu_seconds_total
memcached_process_user_cpu_seconds_total
memcached_read_bytes_total
memcached_slab_items_outofmemory_total
memcached_up
memcached_uptime_seconds
memcached_version
memcached_written_bytes_total
up

Changelog

# 1.0.0 - July 2024

* Add new alert MemcachedOutOfMemoryErrors
* Show data on the dashboard even if 'cluster' label is missing

# 0.0.5 - September 2023

* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.

# 0.0.4 - December 2022

* Update mixin to latest version
* Add screenshot

# 0.0.3 - September 2022

* Update dashboard panels descriptions.

# 0.0.2 - October 2021

* Update mixin to latest version:
  - Update queries to use $__rate_interval

# 0.0.1 - November 2020

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your Memcached instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.