VMware Blockchain includes the ability to collect or publish monitoring metrics from the Replica and Client nodes in your blockchain deployment. You can collect the metrics and use third-party providers to analyze the metrics. VMware Blockchain also supports publishing metrics to the Tanzu Observability by Wavefront, ELK stack platform, or a third-party provider that supports REST endpoints. The published metrics are in the Prometheus or JSON formats.
Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is a Software as a Service offering with an analytics platform that allows you to create monitoring dashboards for tracking metrics and alerting. You can scale to significant data ingestion rates and query loads. Tanzu Observability by Wavefront dashboard lets you examine details of historical data collected from many services and sources across the entire application stack.
ELK is the acronym for three open-source projects, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. The Elasticsearch project is used as a search and analytics engine. For monitoring VMware Blockchain metrics, users must create ELK dashboards. See Set Up an ELK Index Pattern for AWS. Kibana provides visual data with charts and graphs in Elasticsearch.
The metrics are gathered from all the monitored components and forwarded to the Tanzu Observability by Wavefront proxy or ELK stack, depending on your platform configuration. Only metrics information is sent to Elasticsearch. There is no capability to send logging information to Elasticsearch.
The metrics data is buffered and pushed automatically to the Tanzu Observability by Wavefront service dashboard only. The Tanzu Observability by Wavefront service provides dashboards for monitoring metrics and configuring alerts.
VMware Blockchain does not support a specific version of the ELK stack. Environment-specific configurations for your default ELK stack settings might be required to ensure that the collected metrics information is accurate. Contact your VMware Blockchain technical specialist for assistance with ELK stack configurations.
To view the metrics in the ELK dashboard, manually define an ELK index pattern and provide that index pattern to Kibana for visualization.
VMware Blockchain does not manage the ELK stack metrics visualization.
You can configure VMware Blockchain deployments to automate the creation of infrastructure dashboards, including system, network, and Docker metrics on Amazon CloudWatch. Amazon CloudWatch is not region-specific but global. See Configuring the Infrastructure Descriptor Parameters on AWS.
Current Release Metrics Limitations
Some limitations are scheduled to be addressed in future VMware Blockchain releases.
Tanzu Observability by Wavefront limitations are as follows:
VMware Blockchain can only deliver metrics to a single Tanzu Observability by Wavefront subscription. The monitoring metrics can be available to the VMware SRE subscription, or the metrics can be available to the user's Tanzu Observability by Wavefront subscription. Both parties cannot access the monitoring metrics from their subscriptions simultaneously.
To view monitoring metrics, the user must grant access to their Tanzu Observability by Wavefront subscription to the VMware SRE or vice versa.
Deployed blockchain nodes must have outbound connectivity to the Tanzu Observability by Wavefront service hosted on the cloud to send metrics.
ELK limitations are as follows:
ELK must be deployed on-premises because there is no provisioning for proxy.
Metric data is not buffered. If there is a network connectivity problem, it might result in the loss of metric data.
Users must create ELK dashboards for monitoring metrics. See Set Up an ELK Index Pattern for AWS.
