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Enabling IBM Cloud Monitoring agent for non-orchestrated environments

Enabling IBM Cloud Monitoring agent for non-orchestrated environments

When you provision a monitoring instance, you can enable the agent for non-orchestrated environments. You can access metrics through the pre-built dashboards that are available in the IBM Cloud dashboards section.

Configuring IBM Cloud Monitoring agent for non-orchestrated environments

To enable 'no driver mode' and monitor and manage metrics, you need to configure a monitoring agent for non-orchestrated environments in each environment that you want to use 'no driver mode'.

Use these steps to enable 'no driver mode'.

  1. Provision a Graduated tier monitoring instance by following the steps in Provisioning a monitoring instance. For more information about the Graduate tier, see Monitoring service plans.

  2. Enable monitoring 'no driver mode' by following the steps that correspond to your provisioned environment by following the steps in Configuring a monitoring agent.

  3. Add the following configuration to the dragent.yaml file:

    feature:
  mode: `monitor_light`
  Available options for the feature mode are: `monitor_light | monitor | none`.

    OR

    Alternatively, you can use the following curl command:

    curl -sL https://ibm.biz/install-sysdig-agent | sudo bash -s -- -a SYSDIG_ACCESS_KEY -c COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT --collector_port 6443 --secure true -ac "feature:\n mode: monitor_light"

    Where

    SYSDIG_ACCESS_KEY is the ingestion key for the instance.

    COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT is the ingestion URL for the region where the monitoring instance is available.

  4. Restart the agent.

    After you complete the previous steps, limited functionality is implemented and you see the reduced pricing on your invoice.

What's next

After you provision your monitoring agent and enable 'no driver mode', you need to configure a monitoring agent in each environment that you want to monitor. For more information about configuring a monitoring agent, see Configuring a monitoring agent.

IBM Cloud Monitoring 'no driver mode' metrics

IBM Cloud Monitoring collects basic virtual server instance metrics such as CPU usage, disk usage, network traffic, and memory. These metrics are stored in IBM Cloud Monitoring. You can access metrics through the prebuilt monitoring dashboard.

Use the following table to see which metrics are available in 'no driver mode'.

Table 1. Monitoring 'no driver mode' metrics
Name Description
cpu.cores.used CPU core usage
cpu.cores.used.percent CPU core usage percent for each container
cpu.idle.percent The percentage of time that the CPUs were idle and the system had no outstanding disk I/O requests
cpu.iowait.percent The percentage of time that the CPUs were idle and the system did an outstanding disk I/O requests
cpu.nice.percent The percentage of user level CPU utilization with 'Nice' priority
cpu.stolen.percent The percentage of time that a virtual machine CPU is in a state of involuntary wait because the physical CPU is shared among virtual machines.
cpu.system.percent The percentage of system level CPU utilization
cpu.used.percent The percentage of system level CPU utilization
cpu.user.percent The percentage of user level CPU utilization
load.average.percpu.1m The average number of jobs in the CPU run queue or waiting for disk I/O averaged over 1 minute for all cores.
load.average.percpu.5m The average number of jobs in the CPU run queue or waiting for disk I/O averaged over 5 minutes for all cores
load.average.percpu.15m The average number of jobs in the CPU run queue or waiting for disk I/O averaged over 15 minutes for all cores
memory.bytes.available Available memory
memory.bytes.total Total memory of a host
memory.bytes.used Total memory used
memory.bytes.virtual Physical memory in use
memory.pageFault.major Count of the condition that occurs when a program accesses a memory page that is mapped in the virtual address space, but not loaded in physical memory
memory.pageFault.minor A count of the condition in which a memory page was loaded in memory at the time when the page fault was generated, but was not marked in the memory management unit as being loaded in memory.
memory.swap.bytes.available The swap memory is available. Determined by the sum of the free and cached swap memory.
memory.swap.bytes.total Total amount of swap memory
memory.swap.bytes.used Amount of swap memory used
memory.swap.used.percent The percentage of swap memory used
memory.used.percent The percentage of physical memory in use
file.bytes.in Bytes read from the file
file.bytes.out Bytes written to the file
file.bytes.total Total number of bytes written to, and read from, the file
file.iops.in File read operations per second
file.iops.out File write operations per second
file.iops.total Total number of file read and write operations per second
file.open.count Number of times a file was opened
file.time.in Time reading a file
file.time.out Time writing a file
file.time.total Total time during file I/O
fs.bytes.free Total number of free bytes
fs.bytes.total Size of the file system
fs.bytes.used Total number or bytes used
fs.free.percent The percentage of file system free
fs.inodes.total.count Number of inodes in the file system
fs.inodes.used.count Number of inodes used in the file system
fs.inodes.used.percent The percentage of file system inodes used
fs.largest.used.percent The percentage of largest file system
fs.root.used.percent The percentage of root file system used
fs.used.percent The percentage of the file system used
net.bytes.in Inbound network bytes
net.bytes.out Outbound network bytes
net.bytes.total Total network bytes
proc.count Number of processors
thread.count Number of CPU threads or virtual cores
container.count Numbers of containers
system.uptime Total system uptime
uptime The percentage of time the selected entity or entities was down over the defined time window

IBM Cloud Monitoring 'no driver mode' troubleshooting metrics

To switch to Troubleshooting mode, add the following configuration to the dragent.yaml file:

feature:  
      mode: troubleshooting

Then, restart the agent.

'no driver mode' troubleshooting metrics

Use the following table to see which troubleshooting metrics are available in 'no driver mode'.

Table 2. 'no driver mode' troubleshooting metrics
Metric Description
file.error.total.count Number of errors that are caused by accessing files
file.bytes.total Total number of bytes written to, and read from, the file
file.bytes.in Number of bytes read from the file
file.bytes.out Number of bytes written from the file
file.open.count Number of times the file was opened
file.time.total Time that was spent during file I/O
host.count Number of system calls
host.error.count The number of system call errors
proc.count Number of processes on host or container
proc.start.count Number of process starts on host or container