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Comment by bacondude3 | Hacker News Reader

What's a good alternative to Prometheus when pulling stats is impractical? Say I want to monitor a personal laptop like I would a server. It will change networks and IP addresses, so pulling would be impractical to configure, whereas the laptop could easily(?) push its stats to a remote server.

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Prometheus supports writing (replicating) data to a remote endpoint on a per scrape basis with a protocol called remote-write. You can pretty easily set that up on any Prometheus instance. There are quite some implementations to receive those remote-write requests: https://prometheus.io/docs/operating/integrations/#remote-en...

You're probably exactly looking for something like that. In fact, I've given a talk about a similar scenario at the KubeCon San Diego: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrcfxkbJH20

Disclosure: I work on Thanos and Thanos Receiver which implements that protocol.

Oh, I had no idea about that. Thanks!

I've been using ZeroTier [0] so whenever my laptop is online, it's also accessible by Prometheus so it can be scraped. I run ZeroTier in a container on my router, and on each "road warrior" that needs LAN access (laptop, phone...).

The caveat is that I have no metrics when the laptop is offline but that doesn't happen very often anyway.

[0] https://www.zerotier.com/

That looks like a really cool solution. Thanks for the suggestion!

You can run lightweight vmagent [1] on your laptop. The vmagent collects all the metrics from your laptop and then sends them to remote storage when connection to the remote storage is available. It can send data to any remote storage system that support Prometheus remote_write protocol [2].

[1] https://victoriametrics.github.io/vmagent.html

[2] https://prometheus.io/docs/operating/integrations/#remote-en...

That looks like a really promising solution. Thanks!

You can use push approach. Like graphite. Grafana has excellent support of graphite queries. Also graphite has low-footprint implementation https://github.com/baverman/hisser

Telegraf + InfluxDB?

This is my setup on all my raspberrypis. I have not be been able to figure out how to monitor a cluster though. I saw that grafana free tier doesn’t allow a cluster of servers getting monitored. I have telegraf + influxdb + grafana installed on all my servers.

Could you expand on what you mean by:

> grafana free tier doesn’t allow a cluster of servers getting monitored.

Is there a particular aspect of the cluster you're missing? Is it that you don't want individual server metrics?

I have telegraf + influxdb + grafana-server installed on each of my Rpis giving me multiple dashboards. I want only one grafana-server dashboard where all the telegraf metrics could be seen.

vmagent + victoriametrics :)

Use a push gateway?

If you use wireguard you can tell Prometheus to scrape your ip on the wireguard network

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