NOTE: PromDash is deprecated. We recommend Grafana for visualization of Prometheus metrics nowadays, as it has native Prometheus support and is widely adopted and powerful.

PromDash

Dashboards for Prometheus.

Testing

Ruby

$ bundle exec rake

Javascript

$ RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake karma:run

JSHint

JSHint is run against all pull requests. To shorten the feedback loop, it is recommended that you run JSHint locally. With NPM installed, install and run JSHint:

$ npm install jshint -g
$ jshint app/assets/javascripts

Deployment

Development Mode

You need need to install multiple dependencies for the full development cycle. Here is the rundown for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as a reference. If you run into errors with bundle, the most likely reason is that the database servers are not properly installed with dev headers/libs.

• Node.js
• sudo apt-get install nodejs nodejs-legacy npm
• Ruby
• sudo apt-get install ruby-full (details)
• MySQL
• sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev (details)
• PostgreSQL
• sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.{3|4} postgresql-server-dev-9.{3|4} (details)
• SQLite
• sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev (details)

Install gems:

bundle

Set up your database:

cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
RAILS_ENV=development bundle exec rake db:setup

Start the Rails server:

bundle exec rails s

Production Mode

In production mode, you need to define a number of environment variables to configure the database parameters:

DATABASE_URL="mysql2://username:password@host/database"
RAILS_ENV="production"

Note: Besides MySQL, you may also use any other Rails-compatible relational database like PostgreSQL or SQLite3. See also http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html.

Create a self-contained Ruby environment and precompile assets:

make build

Run the production server from the bundled environment:

bin/env bin/bundle exec bin/thin -p $PORT start

Deploy with Docker

To deploy PromDash with Docker, use the prom/promdash Docker image. By default, the image will start the thin webserver webserver in production mode. To run rake tasks like migrations, you can specify any kind of command as parameter to the Docker image.

Super easy quickstart deployment with Docker

The following is a quick-start example for running PromDash with a file-based local database.

First, create the SQLite3 database in a shared local Docker volume on the host:

docker run --rm -v /tmp/prom:/tmp/prom \
       -e DATABASE_URL=sqlite3:/tmp/prom/file.sqlite3 \
       prom/promdash ./bin/rake db:migrate

Now, we launch PromDash with the database we've just created:

docker run -p 3000:3000 -v /tmp/prom:/tmp/prom \
       -e DATABASE_URL=sqlite3:/tmp/prom/file.sqlite3 \
       prom/promdash

You can pass parameters directly to the thin server with:

docker run -p 3000:4000 -v /tmp/prom:/tmp/prom \
       -e DATABASE_URL=sqlite3:/tmp/prom/file.sqlite3 \
       prom/promdash ./bin/thin -a localhost -p 4000 start

Deploy behind a reverse proxy

To deploy PromDash behind a reverse proxy you can set a global path prefix using both environment variables PROMDASH_PATH_PREFIX and RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT. Once set all URLs will start with the given prefix.

One simple way to secure your Prometheus deployment with authentication is running a reverse proxy, Prometheus, and PromDash on the same machine. The goal is to have a publicly available deployment for authenticated users via your reverse proxy while restricting raw IP:PORT access. We won't cover any details on how to configure your reverse proxy, as it depends on what you are using.

As PromDash executes Prometheus queries directly from the client it is simpler to use a single domain. This makes the server side ACL management simpler and the client requests already authenticated.

Reverse proxy (e.g. nginx, HAProxy)

• Set up single domain.
• Route http(s)://dash.example.com/dash to backend localhost:3000
• Route http(s)://dash.example.com/prom to backend localhost:9090
• Configure the same ACL, e.g. HTTP basic auth for both backends.

Run Prometheus with binding only to localhost to restrict direct external access over the network that would circumvent your authentication. Remember to pass the path portion in -web.external-url. Example for Docker: (full reference)

docker run -p 127.0.0.1:9090:9090 -v /prometheus-data \
       prom/prometheus -config.file=/prometheus-data/prometheus.yml \
                       -web.external-url "http://dash.example.com/prom"

Run PromDash in a similar fashion. Once PromDash is running add a Prometheus server with http://dash.example.com/prom/ in the web UI at http://dash.example.com/dash.

docker run -p 127.0.0.1:3000:3000 -v /tmp/prom:/tmp/prom \
       -e DATABASE_URL=sqlite3:/tmp/prom/file.sqlite3 \
       -e PROMDASH_PATH_PREFIX=/dash \
       -e RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT=/dash \
       prom/promdash

Finally check that your reverse proxy is working as expected by visiting dash.example.com/dash and dash.example.com/prom. Both should prompt you for credentials, e.g. HTTP basic auth. You can use a Chrome incognito tab to force authentication. Next visit the public facing IP address on the ports <IP>:3000/dash and <IP>:9090/prom to verify they are in fact giving a page load error.

Deployment Checklist

Before deploying a new version of PromDash, follow this checklist:

• Study what has changed since the last deployment:
  • Do any migrations need to be performed (bundle exec rake db:migrate)?
  • Do any new environment variables need to be set?
  • Did any of the stored dashboard JSON formats change in a backwards-incompatible way?
• To be safe, create a backup of the current PromDash database.
• Do tests pass for the new revision?
• Are there any other particularly risky changes?

After deploying a new version:

• Perform a hard refresh in the browser to ensure all loaded assets are up-to-date.
• Test basic functionality as appropriate (Prometheus and Graphite graph settings, etc.).

Security Considerations

Since we frequently need to display various PromDash views in inline frames, we disabled Rails' default header X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN for all views:

https://github.com/prometheus/promdash/commit/5b1da215296b5316568ad7c8449652f0d7f74ebe

If you are worried about clickjacking attacks, it is safe to revert this commit as long as you don't need to display dashboards in iframes.