Collecting Alfresco metrics with Telegraf

This guide aims to demonstrate how to set up Telegraf to collect JMX and Micrometer metrics from an Alfresco Content Services instance. The collected metrics in this example are shipped to an InfluxDB instance but Telegraf supports other outputs as well. See output plugins for details.

Prerequisites

This example uses config files from docs/docker-compose/examples/config folder:

• telegraf-overrides.yaml
• telegraf.conf

To ease the setup process, you can copy these files to docker-compose folder.

For Jolokia to work it is required to download the Jolokia JVM agent jar file and place it in docker-compose folder.

Running the Example

When the files are in place, you can start the ACS instance with Telegraf enabled:

docker-compose -f compose.yaml -f telegraf-overrides.yaml up -d

This will start the ACS instance with Telegraf configured to collect Jolokia and Micrometer metrics and ship them to an InfluxDB instance.

Micrometer Configuration

To enable Micrometer metrics in Alfresco Content Services, the following Java system properties need to be set:

    environment:
      JAVA_OPTS: >-
        -Dmetrics.enabled=true
        -Dmetrics.dbMetricsReporter.enabled=true
        -Dmetrics.dbMetricsReporter.query.enabled=true
        -Dmetrics.dbMetricsReporter.query.statements.enabled=true
        -Dmetrics.jvmMetricsReporter.enabled=true
        -Dmetrics.restMetricsReporter.enabled=true
        -Dmetrics.restMetricsReporter.path.enabled=true
        -Dmetrics.tomcatMetricsReporter.enabled=true
        -Dmetrics.authenticationMetricsReporter.enabled=true

These properties are already included in the telegraf-overrides.yaml file. This configuration enables repository to expose metrics on http://localhost:8080/alfresco/s/prometheus endpoint.

Telegraf is configured to collect these metrics with the following section in the telegraf.conf file:

[[inputs.prometheus]]
  urls = [
    "http://alfresco:8080/alfresco/s/prometheus"
  ]

The hostname alfresco is used as the Telegraf container and Alfresco Content Services container are part of the same Docker network created by Docker Compose. This configuration is specific to the prometheus input plugin.

Shipping Micrometer metrics to InfluxDB is configured with the following section in the telegraf.conf file:

[[outputs.influxdb_v2]]
  bucket = "alfresco"
  organization = "alfresco"
  timeout = "5s"
  token = "influx"
  urls = [
    "http://influxdb2:8086"
  ]

This configuration is specific to the influxdb_v2 output plugin

There is a regex plugin configured to transform the Micrometer metric similar to what is described in Micrometer documentation.

To verify that Micrometer metrics are being collected and shipped to InfluxDB you can enter InfluxDB UI at http://localhost:8086 with the following credentials:

• Username: alfresco
• Password: alfresco

Once logged in, you can use the Data Explorer to query the alfresco bucket and visualize the metrics.

Jolokia Configuration

To enable JMX metrics collection with Jolokia, the following Java system properties need to be set:

    environment:
      JAVA_OPTS: >-
        -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
        -javaagent:/usr/local/tomcat/lib/jolokia-agent-jvm.jar=port=7777,host=0.0.0.0,user=admin,password=admin
    volumes:
      - ./jolokia-agent-jvm-2.3.0-javaagent.jar:/usr/local/tomcat/lib/jolokia-agent-jvm.jar:ro
    ports:
      - "7777:7777"

These properties are already included in the telegraf-overrides.yaml file. This configuration attaches the Jolokia JVM agent to the Alfresco process, which exposes the JMX MBeans over an HTTP endpoint on port 7777.

Telegraf is configured to collect these metrics with the following section in the telegraf.conf file:

[[inputs.jolokia2_agent]]
  urls = ["http://alfresco:7777/jolokia"]
  username = "admin"
  password = "admin"

  [[inputs.jolokia2_agent.metric]]
    name = "alfresco_authority"
    mbean = "Alfresco:Name=Authority"
# ... other MBeans

The hostname alfresco is used as the Telegraf container and Alfresco Content Services container are part of the same Docker network created by Docker Compose. This configuration is specific to the jolokia2_agent input plugin.

Starlark processor is used to transform the collected JMX metrics before shipping them to InfluxDB. It retrieves the Alfresco version from the Alfresco:Name=RepositoryDescriptor,Type=Current and Java version from Alfresco:Name=SystemProperties MBeans and adds it as a tag to all metrics.

Shipping metrics is done using the same InfluxDB configuration as for Micrometer metrics.