Monitoring and Alerting Bold BI in Windows Using Grafana and Prometheus.

Configuring Grafana and Prometheus

Follow these steps to configure Grafana and Prometheus on the Windows machine.

1. Click here to download the Grafana exe file.

2. Click here to download the Prometheus folder.

3. Click here to download the Windows Exporter for Prometheus.
   

   

4. Install the Grafana and Node Exporter on the Windows machine.

5. After installation, access http://localhost:3000 for Grafana UI, http://localhost:9182 for Windows exporter UI, and http://localhost:9090 for Prometheus UI .

6. Use admin as a username and password for Grafana login.

7. Unzip the Prometheus zipped folder and run the Prometheus.exe file.

8. You must run the Prometheus exe in Bold BI installed machine.

9. Open the Prometheus.yaml file and re-run the exe file for changes. Add the following content for monitoring the IIS server.
   

   

10. After adding, save the yaml file, and again start the Prometheus.

    

11. After you log in to the Grafana, add a Prometheus data source.

    
    

12. Select Prometheus in the list.

    

13. Give the name and host of the data source.

    

14. Click save and test.

    

Monitoring Bold BI

1. If your data source works fine, It will show as follows.

   

2. Create a dashboard for monitoring in Grafana.

   

   Note: Import some dashboards existing in the Grafana Labs.

3. Use the following dashboard ID for monitoring all Bold BI IIS services.

4. Enter the dashboard ID and click Load.

   

5. Name the dashboard, select the data source, and click Import.

   

6. After importing, you will see the dashboard, which gives details about Bold BI.

   

   Note: click here for more dashboards.

Configure alerting

Follow these steps for configuring alerts in Grafana.

1. Before creating an alert, create a notification channel.

2. For creating a notification channel, first create an SMTP configuration for Grafana.

3. Go to local disk C->Program Files->Grafanalabs->Grafana->config->default.ini.

4. Open the default.ini file, go to the SMTP section, and give the SMTP credentials.

   

5. Refer to here to configure SMTP in our Gmail for Grafana.

6. Save the changes in default.ini.

7. Go to the services app and right click on Grafana and give restart.

8. Add a contact point for alerting the notification.

   

9. Click the new contact point to add your email for receiving alerting notifications.

   

10. You can also test the notifications by clicking the test icon.

11. Then, create the alert rules by clicking the new alert rule.

    

12. Grafana will send you the default alerts.

13. Now, create an alert that will send a mail whenever any of the Bold BI services goes down.

14. Open the default.ini file located in the Grafana installation directory C->Program Files->Grafanalabs->Grafana->config->default.ini. in a text editor.

15. Find the section called [alerting] and add the following lines.

[alerting]
evaluator-frequency = 1m
rule-1 = {"alert": "IIS Service Alert", "expr": "win_service_status{name=\"W3SVC\"} == 0", "for": "5m", "labels": {"severity": "critical"}, "annotations": {"summary": "IIS service is down on {{ $labels.instance }}"}, "notifications": [{"type": "email", "send_resolved": true, "to": "youremail@example.com"}]}

18. Save the default.ini file and restart the Grafana server for the changes to take effect.
19. This rule will alert you via email when the IIS service is down on a server.
    
    
20. You can create customized alerts based on your requirements by referring to here.