0
Prometheus is an open source time series database optimized to collect large numbers of metrics from cloud infrastructure. This article will explore how industry standard
sFlow telemetry streaming supported by
network devices (Arista, Aruba, Cisco, Dell, Huawei, Juniper, etc.) and
Host sFlow agents (Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, AIX, Solaris, Docker, Systemd, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix AHV, Xen) can be integrated with Prometheus to extend visibility into the network.
The diagram above shows the elements of the solution: sFlow telemetry streams from hosts and switches to an instance of
sFlow-RT. The sFlow-RT analytics software converts the raw measurements into metrics that are accessible through a
REST API. The
sflow-rt/prometheus application extends the REST API to include native Prometheus exporter functionality allowing Prometheus to retrieve metrics. Prometheus stores metrics in a time series database that can be queries by
Grafana to build dashboards.
Update 19 October 2019, native support for Prometheus export added to sFlow-RT, Prometheus application no longer needed to run this example, use URL:
/prometheus/metrics/ALL/ALL/txt. The Prometheus application is needed for exporting traffic flows, see
Flow metrics with Prometheus and Grafana.
The Docker
sflow/prometheus image provides a simple way to run the application:
docker run --name sflow-rt -p 8008:8008 -p Continue reading