Chapter 23. Monitoring and observability

This chapter provides a number of ways to monitor and obtain metrics and logs from your Red Hat Virtualization system. These methods include:

  • Using Data Warehouse and Grafana to monitor RHV
  • Sending metrics to a remote instance of Elasticsearch
  • Deploying Insights in Red Hat Virtualization Manager

23.1. Using Data Warehouse and Grafana to monitor RHV

23.1.1. Grafana dashboards

Grafana is a web-based UI tool used to display the data stored in the oVirt Data Warehouse PostgreSQL database under the database name ovirt_engine_history. See Grafana dashboards.

Data from the Manager is aggregated in hourly and daily aggregations. The data is retained according to the scale setting defined in the Data Warehouse configuration during engine-setup (Basic or Full scale):

  • Basic (default) - sampled every 24 hours, hourly data saved for 1 month, daily data - no daily aggregations saved.
  • Full (recommended)- sampled every 24 hours, hourly data saved for 2 months, daily aggregations saved for 5 years.

Full sample scaling may require migrating the Data Warehouse to a separate virtual machine.

Note

Red Hat only supports installing the Data Warehouse database, the Data Warehouse service and Grafana all on the same machine as each other, even though you can install each of these components on separate machines from each other.

23.1.2. Configuring Grafana

Installation

Grafana integration is enabled and installed by default when running Red Hat Virtualization Manager engine-setup for Stand Alone Manager installations. For Self-Hosted engine installations, you must enable Grafana integration manually when running engine-setup.

To enable Grafana integration in the Self-Hosted engine:

  1. Log in to the machine where you want to install Grafana.

  2. Run the engine-setup command as follows: 

    # engine-setup --reconfigure-optional-components

  3. Answer Yes to install Grafana on this machine: 

    Configure Grafana on this host (Yes, No) [Yes]:

To access the Grafana dashboards:

  • Go to https://<engine FQDN or IP address>/ovirt-engine-grafana

or

  • Click Monitoring Portal in the web administration welcome page for the Administration Portal.

Built-in Grafana dashboards

The following dashboards are available in the initial Grafana setup to report Data Center, Cluster, Host, and Virtual Machine data:

  • Executive dashboards - display the user console connection activity, operating system count for hosts, and active virtual machines.
  • Trend dashboards - display trends in virtual machines, CPU, memory, network, interface, transmit and receive, disks, read and write activity.
  • Service Level dashboards - display uptime, downtime, quality of service, and intervals for important thresholds (CPU, memory).
  • Inventory dashboards - displays an inventory list of hosts in a cluster, disk usage in a storage domain, virtual machines in a cluster, and data per data center.

Customized Grafana dashboards

You can create customized dashboards or copy and modify existing dashboards according to your reporting needs. 

NOTE:
Built-in dashboards cannot be customized.