How to send metrics & logs from bare metal servers to Cockpit

Reviewed on 13 February 2024 • Published on 13 February 2024

Monitoring your dedicated servers with Scaleway Cockpit offers detailed information about performance and health, ensuring optimal functionality and proactive issue resolution.

Cockpit provides a user-friendly interface for real-time monitoring of CPU, memory, disk usage, and network activity, enhancing the reliability and performance of bare metal servers.

Cockpit dashboard updates

Starting April 2024, a new version of Cockpit will be released.

In this version, the concept of regionalization will be introduced to offer you more flexibility and resilience for seamless monitoring. If you have created customized dashboards with data for your Scaleway resources before April 2024, you will need to update your queries in Grafana, with the new regionalized data sources.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

A Scaleway account logged into the console
Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
An Elastic Metal or Dedibox server running on a Linux operating system

Important

Having the default configuration on your agents might lead to more of your resources’ metrics being sent, a high consumption and a high bill at the end of the month.
Sending metrics and logs for Scaleway resources or personal data using an external path is a billable feature. In addition, any data that you push yourself is billed, even if you send data from Scaleway products. Refer to the product pricing for more information.

Accessing Cockpit

Create a token with the push permission for metrics/logs to Cockpit by following the instructions provided in the dedicated documentation.
Configure the Grafana Agent to push metrics/logs to Cockpit. Refer to the official documentation for detailed instructions.
Tip
For efficient cost management and near real-time resource monitoring, it is recommended to set the interval to 1 minute.
Retrieve your Grafana credentials, then use them to access your Cockpit dashboards.

Importing dashboards

To monitor your bare metal servers, you can import pre-configured dashboards from the Grafana dashboard repository. One such dashboard is the Node Exporter Full dashboard, offering detailed server metrics. Follow these steps to import it:

Visit the Node Exporter Full dashboard on the Grafana dashboard repository.
Copy the dashboard ID by clicking Copy ID.
In Cockpit, navigate to the Dashboards section.
Click Import and paste the copied dashboard ID.
Follow the prompts to complete the import process.

This process allows you to push metrics and logs to Scaleway’s Cockpit (Grafana) and monitor your Elastic Metal servers with real-time tracking of their health and performance.