Skip to main content

Visualizing with Grafana

Grafana is a powerful and flexible visualization tool that can turn raw metrics into clear, real-time dashboards. When integrated with MooseFS via Prometheus, Grafana allows you to monitor key performance indicators—such as chunkserver status, disk usage, operation rates, and replication health—at a glance.

This section walks you through setting up Grafana with Prometheus as a data source, importing or building dashboards, and customizing visualizations to fit your environment. Whether you're keeping an eye on daily operations or investigating performance trends, Grafana helps you turn MooseFS metrics into meaningful insights.

Setting up Grafana dashboards with Prometheus as a data source​

Grafana connects to Prometheus through a native data-source integration.
Once you have configured the Prometheus job described in the “Prometheus Metrics” chapter, Prometheus will begin scraping and storing MooseFS metrics automatically. With this in place, Prometheus can now be added to Grafana as a data source.

To configure:

  1. Install Grafana (via package manager, Docker, or binary distribution).
  2. Open Grafana in your browser and log in as an administrator.
  3. Navigate to:
    Configuration → Data Sources → Add Data Source → Prometheus
  4. Set the Prometheus URL, typically:
http://<prometheus-host>:9090
  1. Click Save & Test.

Grafana will confirm that the connection works and can now access MooseFS metrics from Prometheus.

Prebuilt MooseFS dashboard templates​

To save time, you can import prebuilt MooseFS dashboard templates. These dashboards provide visualizations for i.e.:

  • Chunkserver state monitoring
  • Disk usage per server and cluster-wide
  • Master operations rate
  • Replication and rebalancing activity
  • Network traffic

Once your Prometheus data source is configured, you can import these dashboards directly into Grafana.

Prebuilt dashboards are available in the official MooseFS GitHub repository:

https://github.com/moosefs/grafana-dashboards

To import a dashboard:

  1. Open Grafana
  2. Go to Dashboards → Import
  3. Upload the .json file or paste the raw JSON
  4. Choose your Prometheus data source
  5. Save the dashboard

You now have fully functional MooseFS dashboards ready to use.

Creating custom panels for chunkserver status, disk usage, operation rates, etc.​

Grafana makes it easy to tailor dashboards by creating custom panels for operational metrics.

In the Prometheus Metrics chapter, we described how MooseFS metrics are structured, labeled, and exposed (including chunkserver status, disk usage, replication metrics, Master operations, and network statistics). Using that knowledge, you can build custom queries that suit your environment.