APT Monitoring with Prometheus

December 24, 2022 1 min read Monitoring How-To Ronny Trommer

As soon you run a Linux server, you need to make sure your systems are up-to-date. It would also be handy to know if you had Kernel upgrades which require a reboot of the system to get applied.

I came across a blog post from Tom Henderson which provided a solution using the Node_Exporter with Prometheus. The way he solved this is pretty slick. I had to tweak the scripts a bit to get it running. He integrated an APT hook which runs a command on apt update and after installing packages. The hooks create a Prometheus file which can be easily shipped with the Node_Exporter.

SNMP vs. Prometheus – On The Wire

November 15, 2022 4 min read Technology Ronny Trommer

I’ve been working with network monitoring tools for a long time. Working with network devices, there is still today a very high probability you have to deal with SNMP. If you work with modern applications or infrastructure, especially in dynamic environments with containers, you will inevitably run into Prometheus and its ecosystem when you need to design and build monitoring solutions.

By design, both agents have different goals in mind. The world was very different when SNMP aimed to be “simple” in 1980 as it was for Prometheus in 2012. To give you some idea, this was the world when people worked with SNMP RFCs in 1983:

Installing Node Exporter on Linux

March 11, 2021 2 min read Technology Open-Source Ronny Trommer

In OpenNMS Horizon 28+ is now a PrometheusCollector available. It scrapes the metrics from the provided exporter pages and allows to add data collections. As of speaking today it is not 100% feature complete, scraping data types like histograms is not implemented yet. If you want to play around here is a quick way to get the Linux Node_Exporter installed.

The following steps are executed in a root shell with sudo -i.