Monitor your Load Balancer with Scaleway Cockpit

How to monitor your Load Balancer with Scaleway Cockpit

Reviewed on 07 August 2023 • Published on 07 August 2023

You can view your Load Balancer’s metrics by using Scaleway Cockpit. Load Balancer is fully integrated into Cockpit, and allows you to monitor your Load Balancers frontends, backends, and backend servers at a glance, and visualize your metrics and traffic. This page explains how to get started with Scaleway Cockpit for viewing your Load Balancers metrics.

Security & Identity (IAM):

You may need certain IAM permissions to carry out some actions described on this page. This means:

you are the Owner of the Scaleway Organization in which the actions will be carried out, or
you are an IAM user of the Organization, with a policy granting you the necessary permission sets

Requirements:

You have an account and are logged into the Scaleway console
You have created a Load Balancer

How to activate your Cockpit

Scaleway Cockpit is deactivated by default, but you can easily activate it in the Scaleway console by following the procedure detailed here.

How to access the Grafana dashboard

To view your Load Balancer’s metrics, use the Grafana dashboard which is accessible from the Scaleway console:

First you must create a user and their associated credentials (a username and password) for Grafana
Then, you can use these credentials to access the Grafana dashboard for all your Scaleway products, via the Scaleway console.

Create a Grafana user and retrieve their username and password by following this procedure.
From the Scaleway console Cockpit overview page, click Open dashboards in the top right corner.
Enter your Grafana username and password to log in.

You are directed to the list of your Scaleway Cockpit dashboards.
Click LB Overview in the list of dashboards on the left.

You are directed to the Load Balancer dashboard.

How to understand your Load Balancer metrics

Choosing metric parameters

At the top of the dashboard, you can configure the following parameters, which control which metrics are displayed:

A: Time period: Click this drop-down to configure the time period you want the metrics displayed to cover. You can set an absolute time range, from one fixed date-time to another, or use a quick range such as Last 15 minutes or Last 3 hours.
B: Refresh rate: Use the arrow icon to refresh the dashboard, and/or use the drop-down next to it to set the automatic refresh rate.
C: Load Balancer name: Click this drop-down to select which of your Load Balancers you want to display metrics for.
D: Frontend name: Click this drop-down to select which of your Load Balancer’s frontends you want to display metrics for. You can select all attached frontends, or limit the display to only certain frontends.
E: Backend name: Click this drop-down to select which of your Load Balancer’s backends you want to display metrics for. You can select all attached backends, or limit the display to only certain backends.

Load Balancer status

In this section, you see various graphs which report on the status of different components of your Load Balancer.

Healthy loadbalancer backends: Shows how many of your Load Balancer’s backends currently have a healthy status. A backend is considered healthy if at least one of its backend servers is healthy and up.
Healthy loadbalancer backend servers: Shows how many of your Load Balancer’s backend servers are currently in a healthy state. A backend server is considered healthy if it passes its health checks, specifically if the number of failed health checks does not exceed the value set in the Unhealthy threshold parameter.
Backend servers health check: Shows, for each backend server identified by its IP address and the name of the frontend it is attached to, its current status (up (i.e. healthy), or down (unhealthy)).
“Backend name” health check: Shows, for each backend identified by its name, how many of its backend servers are currently in a healthy state.

Backend and frontend delivered/received throughputs

In this section, you see various graphs detailing the delivered and received throughput for your Load Balancer. That is to say, you see the amount of data passing through its frontends, backends, and backend servers.

Tip:

In these graphs, negative numbers represent sent/outgoing data, while positive numbers represent received/incoming data.

Frontend throughput bits per seconds: Data is reported for each frontend (in the example above, for two frontends called http and https). The total combined data is also shown. In each case, the graph shows the data received (from clients) and sent (to the backend).
Backend throughput bits per seconds: Data is reported for each backend (in the example above, for three backends called admin, growth-api and proxy). The total combined data is also shown. In each case, the graph shows the data received (from the frontend) and sent (to the backend server).
Backend server throughput bits per seconds: Data is reported for each backend server, identified by its IP address and the backend it is attached to. The total combined data is also shown. In each case, the graph shows the data received and sent.

Active connections

In this section, you see various graphs detailing the current number of active connections for your Load Balancer.

Note:

This section concerns connections over TCP protocol. However, in the case of a Load Balancer configured to use HTTP protocol, its data will still be reported here (as well as the Layer 7 section below) as the HTTP/HTTPS protocols are included within TCP protocol.

For each frontend, backend and backend server, you can view:
- The number of current open connections.
- The rate of new connections (i.e. the number of new connections, as opposed to pre-established connections, per second)

Layer 7

In this section, you see various graphs detailing the layer 7 (application layer) actions of your Load Balancer.

For each frontend, backend and backend server, you can view:
- The HTTP request rate
- The HTTP response rate per status code