Monitor Pbench with Prometheus and Grafana Cloud

The open source project Pbench from Distributed System Analysis provides a Prometheus exporter so that you can scrape metrics from your server at any one given point in time. To get scalable, long-term metrics storage, configure your Prometheus instance to push scraped samples to compatible remote storage endpoints such as Grafana Cloud’s serverless Mimir database using using remote_write. View the example below for how to configure remote_write in the prometheus.yml config file for Pbench.

Prometheus Configuration for Pbench

The prometheus.yml config file for Pbench can be found at the following location:

https://github.com/distributed-system-analysis/pbench/tree/main/agent/templates/prometheus.yml

Push metrics from Pbench to Grafana Cloud using `remote_write`:

Below is an example remote_write code snippet you will need to add to your prometheus.yml config file in order to forward your metrics from your local Prometheus instance to remote storage with Grafana Cloud:

remote_write:
- url: <Your Metrics instance remote_write endpoint>
  basic_auth:
    username: <Your Metrics instance ID>
    password: <Your Cloud Access Policy token>

You can find the https://...grafana.net/api/prom/push URL, username, and password for your metrics endpoint in the Cloud Portal. Click your stack ‘Details’ then select the Prometheus ‘Detail’. The details display on the right. Need an account? Create a new Grafana Cloud account for free.

Learn more about the available remote_write configuration parameters from the Prometheus.io Configuration Docs.

Control the number of metric data points pushed to Grafana Cloud:

Every Grafana Cloud account includes 10,000 active series metric storage, free-forever.

Grafana Cloud provides additional 1 data point per minute (DPM) resolution for $8 per 1,000 series. You can adjust the total DPM you push to Grafana Cloud by adjusting the scrape_interval settings in your prometheus.yml config file. Learn more about how to adjust your Prometheus scrape interval.