Tutorial: Monitor Aerospike Cloud with Grafana
Objectives
By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to:
- Deploy Grafana Alloy on AWS ECS Fargate to collect metrics.
- Configure Grafana Cloud to visualize Aerospike metrics.
- Create alert rules for storage usage and stop writes.
- Use the Cloud API to manually scale your cluster.
This tutorial shows you how to monitor your Aerospike Cloud database cluster using Grafana Alloy and Grafana Cloud. You deploy a lightweight metrics collector with a single command, then view dashboards and configure alerts in Grafana Cloud’s free tier.
This tutorial is designed for prototyping and evaluating Aerospike Cloud observability. For production deployments, review your organization’s security and infrastructure requirements.
Collecting metrics with Grafana Alloy
Aerospike Cloud runs the Aerospike Prometheus Exporter alongside each cluster node, exposing metrics on port 9145. Grafana Alloy is a lightweight collector that scrapes these metrics and pushes them to Grafana Cloud.
You deploy Alloy on AWS ECS Fargate using a CloudFormation template that creates all required AWS resources. This removes most of the development and management overhead and stays within AWS free tier cost limits.
The deployment takes about 5 minutes and requires only one command.
Visualizing and alerting with Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform with a free tier that includes everything you need for this tutorial.
You import pre-built Aerospike dashboards to visualize cluster health, memory usage, disk usage, and performance metrics. You can also create custom dashboards and alert rules.
When alerts fire, you can use the Aerospike Cloud API to automatically scale your cluster, adding capacity before issues impact your application.
Related documentation
This tutorial uses the same metrics and dashboards as self-managed Aerospike deployments. For additional context, see:
- Key metrics to monitor - Recommended metrics and thresholds
- Dashboards - Available dashboards and PromQL examples
- Aerospike Monitoring repository - Dashboards, alert rules, and configuration files