How to Monitor Aerospike with OpenTelemetry

With observIQ’s latest contributions to OpenTelemetry, you can now use free open source tools to easily monitor Aerospike. The easiest way to use the latest OpenTelemetry tools is with observIQ’s distribution of the OpenTelemetry collector. You can find it here.

In this blog, the Aerospike receiver is configured to monitor metrics locally with OTLP–you can use the Aerospike receiver to ship metrics to many popular analysis tools, including Google Cloud, New Relic, and more. For Google Cloud users, the Aerospike receiver is also available through the Google Ops Agent.

What signals matter?

Aerospike is a distributed, fast noSQL database technology. It uses flash storage for predictable performance, and is useful for its ability to add new nodes without downtime. Aerospike operates in-memory, so memory-related metrics are important to monitor.

• Aerospike.node.memory.free
  • This metric monitors the percentage of memory that is free to the Aerospike node. If the value gets too low, that indicates that the server us reaching its memory limit. If nodes frequently use high amounts of memory, operations should consider adding new nodes or increasing memory allocation per node.
• Aerospike.namespace.memory.free
  • This metric monitors the percentage of memory allocated to the specific namespace that is still available. If a namespace runs out of memory, or reaches its high watermark, writes to the namespace will fail.
• Aerospike.node.connection.count
  • This metric indicates the number of connections opened and closed to the Aerospike node. Anomalous values could indicate client applications being unable to connect or peer nodes being unreachable or frequently crashing.

All of the above metrics and more are shipped when you install the Aerospike receiver.

Installing the Receiver

If you don’t already have an OpenTelemetry collector built with the latest Aerospike receiver installed, we suggest using the observIQ OpenTelemetry Collector distro that includes the aerospike receiver (and many others). Installation is simple with our one-line installer. Come back to this blog after running the install command on your source.

Configuring the Receiver

Navigate to your OpenTelemetry configuration file. The Aerospike receiver is Linux-only. If you’re using the observIQ Collector, you’ll find it in one of the following location:

• /opt/observiq-otel-collector/config.yaml (Linux)

Edit the configuration file to include the Aerospike receiver as shown below:

1receivers:
2    aerospike:
3        endpoint: localhost:9000
4        collect_cluster_metrics: false
5        collection_interval: 30s

Add Aerospike into your Service pipeline so it looks similar to the following. Note that your processors and exporters may be different.

1exporters:
2    otlp:
3        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:9124
4service:
5    pipelines:
6        metrics:
7             receivers: [aerospike]
8 	 exporters: [otlp]

Below are a few editable fields you can add or adjust in the config file.

Viewing the metrics collected

If you followed the steps detailed above, the following Aerospike metrics will now be delivered to your OTel destination.

observIQ’s monitoring technology is a game changer for organizations that care about performance and efficiency. If you’re using Vault, our solutions can make a significant difference in your infrastructure monitoring. Follow this space to keep up with all our future posts and simplified configurations for various sources. For questions, requests, and suggestions, reach out to our support team at support@observIQ.com.