[ovs-discuss] Open vSwitch Prometheus exporter for the kernel datapath

Peter Phaal peter.phaal at inmon.com
Wed May 9 17:36:21 UTC 2018


Matt,

For additional datapath visibility, you might want to consider enabling sFlow. The sFlow telemetry stream includes the ovs_datapath counters you are currently collecting:
https://blog.sflow.com/2015/01/open-vswitch-performance-monitoring.html <https://blog.sflow.com/2015/01/open-vswitch-performance-monitoring.html>

In addition, you get packet samples with metadata about ingress / egress vPort, tunnel, etc. that you can use to understand traffic flowing through the dataplane.

The simplest way to enable sFlow is to deploy Host sFlow (sflow.net <http://sflow.net/>) agents on the hypervisors. You can use sflowtool (https://github.com/sflow/sflowtool <https://github.com/sflow/sflowtool>) to explore the data.

For more advanced sFlow analytics you might want to try sFlow-RT (sflow-rt.com <http://sflow-rt.com/>). For example, the following article describes how to pull sFlow metrics into Prometheus:
https://blog.sflow.com/2018/03/prometheus-and-grafana.html <https://blog.sflow.com/2018/03/prometheus-and-grafana.html>

With sFlow, the metrics from all the hosts are streamed to a central location where they can be polled by Prometheus. This should be more scaleable than requiring Prometheus to poll each host.

Peter

> On May 9, 2018, at 10:04 AM, Matt Layher via discuss <ovs-discuss at openvswitch.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi all!
> 
> At DigitalOcean, we make heavy use of Open vSwitch but haven't ever had much visibility into what the datapath is actually doing.
> 
> To remedy this, we've created and open sourced a Prometheus (https://prometheus.io) metrics exporter for OVS: https://github.com/digitalocean/openvswitch_exporter
> 
> It currently gathers metrics from the kernel datapath using genetlink with the "ovs_datapath" family, but we are open to expanding it to support more metrics and datapaths as well, assuming it can be done in a modular way.
> 
> The README file provides a quick overview of what the statistics look like, but feel free to file an issue if you run into any trouble.
> 
> Thanks for your time, and I hope you find this useful!
> 
> Matt Layher
> DigitalOcean
> 
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