google-cloud

Blackbox Monitoring with Prometheus

10/15/2022 16:40 EDT blackbox-monitoring monitoring prometheus google-cloud grafana gke

Prior to migrating from Cacti to Prometheus for infrastructure monitoring, I’d already been using Prometheus for blackbox monitoring. A couple of years ago I was looking for a way to monitor the health of various services I had deployed across virtual machines and containers running on my home network. I had used Pingdom for this in the past, but they killed their free plan in 2019. I had quite a few services to monitor, including multiple Web servers, a mail server, IRC server, and more. I surveyed the hosted service landscape but the available free options didn’t support the variety of services I needed to monitor; and the paid services cost as much as a single VPS at ARP Networks.

Migrating from Cacti to (Google Managed) Prometheus

10/11/2022 21:10 EDT cacti prometheus google-cloud monitoring grafana gke

I’ve been using Cacti to monitor infrastructure for nearly 20 years. Cacti is a great tool for polling devices via SNMP and renders pretty graphs via RRDtool. However, I’ve been trying to consolidate infrastructure and have settled on Kubernetes (specifically, Google Kubernetes Engine) for running as much of my infrastructure as possible. While it’d be possible to run Cacti on Kubernetes, I wanted to find another option that was more “Kubernetes native”.

Budget GKE deployment

08/23/2020 14:53 EDT kubernetes gke google-cloud

In an effort to better understand Kubernetes, the need to stand up monitoring infrastructure, and the desire to reduce the burden of maintaining a MySQL instance, I decided to check out Google’s GKE offering. As I’d be using this for hosting personal projects, I wanted to keep the cost as low as possible. This, plus latency to my ARP Networks VPSes, is why I chose GKE over other cloud providers.