With a properly implemented Monitoring Service and various metrics, the following is a brief list of advantages of Monitoring Service for clients:

• Centralized Metric Aggregation Users can push metrics from various Prometheus-compatible agents to a central endpoint, where the service aggregates and stores them for comprehensive analysis.

• Unified Querying Interface Metrics and logs (from the logging service) are accessible through a single Grafana instance, allowing users to perform detailed queries and gain insights across all their data sources.

• Scalable Architecture The service is designed to handle extensive volumes of metrics, with the ability to scale up or down according to user needs, ensuring consistent performance regardless of workload.

• High-Performance Data Processing Optimized for speed and efficiency, the service delivers rapid data ingestion, aggregation, and querying, enabling efficient monitoring and analysis.

Benefits

Besides all the topics listed in the features set, there are some more business-related benefits:

• Metrics Unification: Unify metrics across multiple data centers and applications, providing a holistic view of infrastructure and application performance.

• Reduced Cost: By centralizing and scaling the monitoring infrastructure, users can lower costs associated with maintaining and operating separate monitoring solutions.

• Enhanced Data Consistency: Aggregating all metrics in one place ensures consistent and accurate data, improving the reliability of insights and reporting.

The Monitoring Service provides a centralized and scalable solution for monitoring and analyzing your application and infrastructure metrics.

A metric pipeline refers to an instance or configuration of the Monitoring Service you can create using the REST API. To create an instance of the Monitoring Service, you can request the designated regional endpoint based on your desired location:

• Berlin: https://monitoring.de-txl.ionos.com/pipelines

• Frankfurt: https://monitoring.de-fra.ionos.com/pipelines

• London: https://monitoring.gb-lhr.ionos.com/pipelines

• Worcester: https://monitoring.gb-bhx.ionos.com/pipelines

• Paris: https://monitoring.fr-par.ionos.com/pipelines

• Logroño: https://monitoring.es-vit.ionos.com/pipelines

• Lenexa: https://monitoring.us-mci.ionos.com/pipelines

When creating a metric pipeline instance, you can define multiple metric streams within each pipeline. Each stream functions as a separate metric source, allowing you to organize and manage different sources of metrics within your monitoring system.

After the pipeline is set up, a unique endpoint is assigned to each pipeline, thus establishing a connection with an independent metric server. This endpoint serves as the designated destination for sending metrics generated by all the metric sources within the pipeline.

Contract limitations

The maximum number of pipelines you are allowed to create. The default value is 10. If you require a higher limitation boundaries, you can contact team to discuss your specific requirements and adjust the limits accordingly.

Various metric formats are employed in monitoring systems to measure performance, consumption, and other software properties. These formats serve as standardized ways to represent and transmit metric data. Here are some notable metric formats used in monitoring systems:

Prometheus format

Prometheus, a widely used monitoring system, defines its format for metrics, including types like Counter, Gauge, Histogram, and Summary.

After creating a monitoring pipeline via the , complete the monitoring pipeline configuration process using the following:

Monitoring Service ingests data from various parts of your environment into a central system that is responsible for storage, aggregation, visualization, and initiating automated responses and alert when certain conditions are met.

Scenario 1: Application Performance Monitoring

Precondition

An e-commerce company wants to ensure its web application performs optimally, especially during peak traffic periods like holiday sales.

Solution

The Monitoring Service continuously tracks application metrics such as response time, error rates, and throughput. Custom alerts are set up to notify the IT team if response times exceed acceptable thresholds or if error rates spike.

Scenario 2: Infrastructure Monitoring

Precondition

A financial institution needs to monitor its server infrastructure to ensure high availability and reliability of its online banking services.

Solution

The Monitoring Service collects metrics from servers, such as CPU usage, memory usage, disk I/O, and network traffic. Dashboards in Grafana provide real-time visualization, and alerts are configured for resource utilization thresholds.

Scenario 3: Security Monitoring

Precondition

A healthcare provider needs to ensure the security and compliance of its systems that handle sensitive patient data.

Solution

The Monitoring Service tracks security-related metrics such as failed login attempts, unauthorized access attempts, and unusual network activity. Alerts are configured for suspicious activities, and detailed logs are stored for compliance audits.

Scenario 4: DevOps and Continuous Integration

Precondition

A software development team wants to monitor the performance and stability of applications throughout the CI/CD pipeline.

Solution

The Monitoring Service is integrated with the CI/CD tools to collect metrics from development, staging, and production environments. Metrics such as build times, deployment success rates, and test coverage are tracked and visualized in Grafana.

Scenario 5: IoT Device Monitoring

Precondition

A smart home company needs to monitor thousands of IoT devices deployed in customers homes to ensure they are functioning correctly.

Solution

The Monitoring Service collects metrics from IoT devices, such as battery levels, connectivity status, and sensor readings. Alerts are configured for critical metrics, and dashboards provide an overview of device health and performance.

Scenario 6: Business Metrics Monitoring

Precondition

A SaaS company wants to track key business metrics such as user sign-ups, subscription renewals, and revenue growth.

Solution

The Monitoring Service collects business-related metrics and integrates them into Grafana dashboards. Custom alerts are set up to notify the team of significant changes in business metrics.

Scenario 7: Network Monitoring

Precondition

An Internet Service Provider (ISP) needs to monitor its network infrastructure to ensure high availability and performance for its customers.

Solution

The Monitoring Service collects network metrics such as latency, packet loss, and bandwidth usage. Dashboards in Grafana provide real-time visualization of network performance, and alerts are configured for network anomalies.

Users need appropriate privileges to access, create, and modify Monitoring Service. Without necessary privileges, users have a read-only access and cannot provision changes. You can grant appropriate privileges via the User Manager.

To allow users to access, create, and modify the Monitoting Service, follow these steps:

1. In the DCD, go to Menu > Management > Users & Groups. 2. Select the Groups tab in the User Manager window. 3. Select the appropriate group to assign relevant privileges. 4. In the Privileges tab, select Access and manage Monitoring to allow the associated group members to access and manage Monitoring Service.

Create and manage sub-users

For improved user management and delegation, you can establish sub-users and grant them the necessary permissions to use the Monitoring Service. Sub-users can be given varying levels of access for their segment of the monitoring pipeline by the primary account owners. Only the pipelines that the primary account owner has assigned to sub-users are visible to them and can be managed, but they cannot access the primary account or pipelines created by other sub-users.

To create sub-users, follow these steps:

1. In the DCD, go to Menu > Management > Users & Groups. 2. Select the Groups tab in the User Manager window. 3. Select the appropriate group to assign relevant privileges. 4. In the Members tab, click + Add User and select a user(s) from the list.

To delete an associated sub-user, click Remove User.

Obtain your Grafana URL

You can obtain your Grafana instance address by sending a GET request to the server. For more information, see . The response contains the grafanaAddress. This information remains the same for all your monitoring pipelines.

This endpoint enables retrieving all pipelines using pagination and optional filters.

To retrieve all the Monitoring Pipelines, perform a GET request.

Request

The following is a sample request.

Monitoring Service is a cloud-based service that allows you to ingest, aggregate, and analyze data to enhance your understanding of your system's performance and behavior. The service collects data from various parts of your environment into a central system that is responsible for storage, aggregation, visualization, and initiating automated responses and alert when certain conditions are met.

Components of Monitoring Service

The architecture of the Monitoring Service includes the following four main components that can be used to aggregate metrics from various sources, analyze the gathered metrics, and create visualizations for monitoring and report generation.

To obtain a new key, perform a PUT request with the complete key configuration. Ensure that you specify all the mandatory details. The optional fields will be automatically populated with default values or left empty if not specified.

Request

To get a new key for a pipeline, you can use the following request. Remember to replace the {pipelineID} with a valid ID of a pipeline to access its key.

Response

Generates a new key for a pipeline invalidating the old one. The key is used for authentication when sending metrics.

You can send metrics to the Monitoring Service using agents such as Fluent Bit, Grafana Agent, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry Collector.

This Quickstart shows how to create a pipeline, get an API key, and configure one of these agents.

Prerequisites

• An IONOS account with permissions to create monitoring pipelines.

• Outbound HTTPS access on port 443.

• The required agent or collector must be installed on your system.

Example endpoint:

123456789-metrics.987654321.monitoring.de-txl.ionos.com

You can also find Prometheus configuration examples in our .

Configure an agent

Each agent requires the pipeline httpEndpoint and API key.

Troubleshooting

1. Verify: Open the Monitoring Service dashboard and confirm that metrics appear.

2. Invalid API key: Check that you copied the correct key.

3. Connection errors: Verify outbound HTTPS access on port 443.

4. No metrics displayed:

Deletes the specified Pipeline.

To delete a Pipeline, perform a DELETE request with the pipelineId of the pipeline.

Request

The following is a sample request. Remember to replace the {pipelineID} with a valid ID of the specific pipeline that must be deleted.

Response

202 Successful operation

Monitoring Service supports metrics from various Promethues compatible metric sources. Selected agents or exporters can push metrics to selected regional endpoint for ingestion. The collected metrics are processed, stored, and made available for querying and visualization.

Examples provide some suggested and functional Prometheus configurations for our available metric sources.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a monitoring and alerting toolkit that is designed for reliability and scalability. It is a pull-based system that scrapes metrics from instrumented jobs, either directly or via an intermediary push gateway for short-lived jobs. It stores all scraped samples locally and runs rules over this data to either aggregate and record new time series from existing data or generate alerts. We also recommend you try our sample configuration.

Grafana Agent

Grafana Agent is an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with configuration inspired by Terraform. It is designed to be flexible, performant, and compatible with multiple ecosystems such as Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. We also recommend you try our sample configuration.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is a collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools. Use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics) to help you analyze your software’s performance and behavior. We also recommend you try our sample configuration.

FluentBit

FluentBit is a super fast, lightweight, and highly scalable logging and metrics processor and forwarder. It is the preferred choice for cloud and containerized environments. We also recommend you try our sample configuration. This repository provides a basic example of how to configure FluentBit to send metrics to the Ionos Monitoring Service.

To create or update a Pipeline, you need to provide the complete Pipeline configuration. If you wish to create a new Pipeline or modify an existing one with a specified ID, you should include all necessary details in your request. Optional fields will be automatically populated with default values or left empty if not provided. To ensure that the Pipeline is created or updated correctly, perform a PUT request with the full Pipeline data.

Pipeline authentication for secure metric ingestion

To ensure secure and authorized metric data submission, each Monitoring Pipeline is assigned a unique key upon creation. This key acts as a credential for metric exporters or agents pushing data to the pipeline's HTTP endpoint.

The Monitoring Service offers regional APIs that enable programmatic interaction with the platform. These APIs serve various purposes: task automation, system integration, and platform functionality extension. Additionally, the APIs allow you to filter metrics based on different criteria.

Sub-user access control

A sub-user is a user who has access to the Monitoring Service but is not an administrator or an owner. IONOS's crucial access control restriction does not allow sub-users to view or modify pipelines belonging to other sub-user accounts, except the primary administrator, who retains full cross-pipeline privileges. Ensure that the sub-user pipeline ownership and access permissions align with your organizational needs.

If a sub-user account creates a pipeline, access is restricted only to that sub-user and the primary administrator. Other sub-users cannot access or perform CRUD operations on the respective pipeline. For example, if sub-user A creates Pipeline 1, only sub-user A and the primary administrator account can view, edit, delete, or manage Pipeline 1. No other sub-user accounts will have access to it.

Returns the Monitoring Pipeline by ID.

To retrieve a Monitoring Pipeline, perform a GET request.

Request

What is Monitoring Service?

The Monitoring Service offers a centralized and scalable solution for monitoring and analyzing your application and infrastructure metrics. It enables you to track performance, detect issues proactively, and ensure optimal operation across your systems.

What types of metrics can be monitored?

The Monitoring Service supports a wide range of metrics, including system performance, application performance, network traffic, and custom metrics specific to your applications. Metrics must be Prometheus-compatible.

How frequently are metrics pushed to the server?

Metrics are pushed to our servers at configurable intervals to match your monitoring needs. The default push interval is one minute. You can adjust this interval based on your requirements.

Can I set up custom alerts for specific metrics?

Yes, you can easily configure custom alerts directly within Grafana for specific metrics. The Monitoring Service utilized Grafana for visualization, allowing you to define alert conditions, thresholds, and notification preferences.

How secure is the data collected by the Monitoring Service?

The Monitoring Service employs multiple layers of security to ensure data protection:

• Transport Layer Security (TLS): Data is encrypted during transmission.

• Data Partitioning: Each user's data is stored in separate partitions to ensure isolation.

• Encryption: Both server-side and client-side encryption are used to secure data at rest.

Can I customize the dashboards in the Monitoring Service?

Yes, Monitoring Service offers powerful dashboard customization capabilities through Grafana. Create, modify, and share interactive dashboards to visualize your data in the way that best suits your needs. Grafana's rich feature set allows you to build highly informative and engaging dashboards.

How do I manage user access to the Monitoring Service?

User access is managed through a robust role-based access control Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system. Administrators can create user accounts, assign roles, and define permissions to control access to different features and data within the Monitoring Service.

What is the difference between Monitoring as a Service and Monitoring Service?

Can I restrict the traffic sent to Monitoring Service endpoints?

Yes, we recommend configuring firewall rules using the authorized IP addresses associated with each endpoint to restrict the traffic to Monitoring Service endpoints. The following is a list of locations and their specific IP addresses:

What is Cloud Native Computing Foundation?

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is part of the Linux Foundation, focused on advancing cloud-native technologies. It hosts projects like Kubernetes and Prometheus, provides certification, and promotes standards for cloud-native computing.

For more details, visit the website.

Ensures that the pipeline with the provided ID is created or modified. The full pipeline needs to be provided to ensure (either update or create) the pipeline. Non present data will only be filled with defaults or left empty, but not take previous values into consideration.

To ensure that the pipeline with the provided ID is created or modified, perform PUT request.

Request

The following is a sample request. Remember to replace the {pipelineID} with a valid ID of the specific pipeline you want to create or update.

Response

The following is a sample response. The values returned by each response differ based on the request.

200 Successful operation

To find out the available types of metrics, we can start by looking at what type of information we can track.

Host-based metrics

These would be anything involved in evaluating the health or performance of an individual machine, disregarding for the moment its application stacks and services.

• CPU