Skip to content

Monitor the deployment using metrics

This topic outlines the use of standards-based metrics to monitor activity and performance of DX container deployments.

Prometheus metrics and Grafana

The Digital Experience 9.5 Helm deployment supports monitoring the deployment activity with advanced metrics and visualization, by exposing standards-based Prometheus-compatible metrics. Prometheus metrics components can scrape the metrics of most of the DX 9.5 container applications. The collected data is queried from Prometheus and are visualized in operations dashboard solutions, such as Grafana. The following information can advise administrators which Digital Experience 9.5 applications can use these tools with some usage examples.

Digital Experience 9.5 applications and Prometheus metrics

The following Digital Experience 9.5 applications expose metrics that can be tracked with Prometheus metrics.

  • Core
  • Remote Search
  • Content Composer
  • Design Studio
  • Digital Asset Management
  • Image Processor
  • Experience API
  • DAM persistence
  • Ambassador
Application Port Route
Core 10038 /metrics
Remote Search 9060 /metrics
Content Composer 3000 /probe/metrics
Design Studio 3000 /probe/metrics
Digital Asset Management 3000 /probe/metrics
Image Processor 3000 /probe/metrics
Ring API 3000 /probe/metrics
DAM Persistence 9187 /metrics
Ambassador 8877 /metrics

Important

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 does not include a deployment of Prometheus or Grafana. When metrics are enabled in the DX 9.5 Helm chart, the application exposes Prometheus-compatible metrics. Those metrics can be consumed by any common Prometheus installation.

HCL DX 9.5 metrics are compatible with the following deployment and discovery types of Prometheus in Kubernetes environments:

Administrators can configure the HCL DX 9.5 metrics depending on their specific Prometheus deployment, as outlined in the following sections.

Configure Prometheus metrics

To configure the metrics for the Digital Experience 9.5 applications in the DX 9.5 Helm chart, enable scraping in the custom-values.yaml used for the DX 9.5 deployment. The metrics are configured independently for each DX 9.5 application.

Parameter Description Default value
metrics.<application>.scrape Determines if the metrics of this application are scraped by Prometheus. false
metrics.<application>.prometheusDiscoveryType Determines how Prometheus discovers the metrics of a service. Accepts "annotation" and "serviceMonitor". The"serviceMonitor" setting requires that the ServiceMonitor CRD (which comes with the Prometheus Operator), is installed in the cluster. "annotation"

Example configurations:

  • Enable the metrics for DX 9.5 core and add the appropriate annotation for Prometheus:

    metrics:
  core:
    scrape: true
      # prometheusDiscoveryType is optional here as "annotation" is the default
      prometheusDiscoveryType: "annotation"

  • Enable the metrics for DX 9.5 Core and create a ServiceMonitor for Prometheus Operator:

    metrics:
  core:
    scrape: true
     prometheusDiscoveryType: "serviceMonitor"

Grafana dashboards

The exposed DX 9.5 Applications metrics are compatible with a set of existing Grafana operations dashboards that are available from the Grafana dashboard page, as well as a set of Granada-supported custom dashboards provided in JSON format. See following examples, which can be imported directly into Grafana.

Publicly available operations dashboards

You can directly download or import the following dashboards from the Grafana community page using the IDs or links.

ID Dashboard Applications
14151 WebSphere Application Server PMI metrics dashboard Core, Remote Search
11159 NodeJS application dashboard Content Composer, Design Studio, Digital Asset Management, Image Processor, Experience API
9628 PostgreSQL database DAM persistence
10850 Ambassador dashboard Ambassador

HCL Digital Experience custom dashboards

The following dashboards are provided by HCL Software for use with HCL Digital Experience 9.5 deployments. These examples expose custom metrics for DX applications or provide enhanced features for existing dashboards. They are available in the public HCL Software Github repository.

Dashboard Application(s)
dam_dashboard.json Digital Asset Management

References to Prometheus and Grafana installations

Important

The resources outline here are optional deployment examples. HCL Software does not provide direct support for any issues related to the Prometheus metrics or the Grafana visualization tools.

To leverage the full potential of the Digital Experience 9.5 applications metrics, an existing Prometheus and Grafana deployment can be used. Following is a list of additional metrics tracking and visualization services (non-exhaustive) that you can consider when developing solutions according to your deployment needs:

Last update: March 31, 2022