Monitoring


There are different ways to monitor a Pulsar cluster, exposing both metrics relative to the usage of topics and the overall health of the individual components of the cluster.

Collecting metrics

Broker stats

Pulsar broker metrics can be collected from brokers and exported in JSON format. There are two main types of metrics:

  • Destination dumps, which containing stats for each individual topic. They can be fetched using

    bin/pulsar-admin broker-stats destinations
    
  • Broker metrics, containing broker info and topics stats aggregated at namespace level:

    bin/pulsar-admin broker-stats monitoring-metrics
    

All the message rates are updated every 1min.

The aggregated broker metrics are also exposed in the Prometheus format at:

http://$BROKER_ADDRESS:8080/metrics

ZooKeeper stats

The local/global ZooKeeper server and clients that are shipped with Pulsar have been instrumented to expose detailed stats through Prometheus as well.

http://$LOCAL_ZK_SERVER:8000/metrics
http://$GLOBAL_ZK_SERVER:8001/metrics

The default port of local ZooKeeper is 8000 and that of global ZooKeeper is 8001. These can be changed by specifying system property stats_server_port.

BookKeeper stats

For BookKeeper you can configure the stats frameworks by changing the statsProviderClass in conf/bookkeeper.conf.

By default, the default BookKeeper configuration included with Pulsar distribution will enable the Prometheus exporter.

http://$BOOKIE_ADDRESS:8000/metrics

For bookies, the default port is 8000 (instead of 8080) and that can be configured by changing the prometheusStatsHttpPort in conf/bookkeeper.conf.

Configuring Prometheus

You can configure Prometheus to collect and store the metrics data by following the Prometheus Getting started guide.

When running on bare metal, you can provide the list of nodes that needs to be probed. When deploying in a Kubernetes cluster, the monitoring is automatically setup with the provided instructions.

Dashboards

When collecting time series statistics, the major problem is to make sure the number of dimensions attached to the data does not explode.

For that reason we only collect time series of metrics aggregated at the namespace level.

Pulsar per-topic dashboard

The per-topic dashboard instructions are available at Dashboard.

Grafana

You can use grafana to easily create dashboard driven by the data stored in Prometheus.

There is a pulsar-grafana Docker image that is ready to use with the principal dashboards already in place. This is enabled by default when deploying Pulsar on Kubernetes.

To use the dashboard manually:

docker run -p3000:3000 \
        -e PROMETHEUS_URL=http://$PROMETHEUS_HOST:9090/ \
        apachepulsar/pulsar-grafana:latest