{"id":279720,"date":"2024-01-15T17:08:46","date_gmt":"2024-01-15T16:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ci4rail.com\/?p=279720"},"modified":"2024-01-16T14:41:32","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T13:41:32","slug":"how-to-monitor-your-microcontroller-devices-with-prometheus-and-grafana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ci4rail.com\/de\/how-to-monitor-your-microcontroller-devices-with-prometheus-and-grafana\/","title":{"rendered":"Wie du deine Microcontroller Devices mit Prometheus und Grafana monitoren kannst."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Why monitoring?<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h4>\n

You have just completed your firmware for your microcontroller and have a bunch of them installed at your customer’s site. They seem to work, but you are unsure how they behave in the long run? You want to know if they are online, how much memory they uses and how many times they have restarted?<\/p>\n

Well, you could implement a custom solution, but why reinvent the wheel? There are already many tools out there that can help you with this task.<\/p>\n

In this tutorial, I will show you how to monitor your microcontroller devices with Prometheus and Grafana. I will use the ESP32<\/a> as an example. The approach shown is best suited when you have a bunch of devices you want to monitor and the monitoring is done on a server in the same network, for example in an industrial plant.<\/p>\n

What is Prometheus?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Prometheus<\/a> is an open-source monitoring system that was originally built by SoundCloud. It’s main purpose is to collect metrics from servers and applications and store them in a time-series database. It also provides a web interface where you can view the collected metrics and create alerts, but it is not very user-friendly. That’s why we will use Grafana to visualize the data.<\/p>\n

So, how does Prometheus work? It uses a pull-based model, which means that it periodically scrapes metrics from the configured targets. The targets can be an application that exposes metrics, a server, or it can be your microcontroller device.<\/p>\n

Prometheus has a node-exporter that can be used to collect metrics from the host system. It can be used to monitor the CPU, memory, disk space, network traffic, etc. The node-exporter is made for typical linux servers, but since we are using a microcontroller based device which has very limited resources, we will implement our own solution.<\/p>\n

How to expose the metrics?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Prometheus expects the metrics in the Prometheus exposition format<\/a> via a http endpoint. A typical endpoint is \/metrics<\/code>, on port 9100, but you can use other endpoints and ports. We’ll see later how to configure Prometheus. This means our microcontroller device needs to implement a http server that exposes the metrics in the correct format.<\/p>\n

Metrics<\/strong><\/h4>\n

The most important types of metrics are counters and gauges.<\/p>\n