Setup Grafana

Hermes provides many metrics to monitor its activity. You can find a detailed description of all the metrics in the Telemetry section. In this chapter, you will install Grafana components which will ingest the data produced by Hermes and provide both analytics and visualization.

Install Docker

You will need Docker installed and configured on your machine. We provide a Compose file to install Grafana and all its dependencies through Docker.

To install and configure Docker, please follow the Docker official documentation.

Tools

Grafana Dashboard

Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources. It can be used to monitor the health of an application and the data it produces. In the following tutorial, we will use a Grafana Dashboard to visualize the Prometheus metrics and the logs.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a free software application used for event monitoring and alerting. It records real-time metrics in a time series database (allowing for high dimensionality) built using an HTTP pull model, with flexible queries and real-time alerting. Hermes can expose Prometheus metrics. The Prometheus server will pull them and Grafana will use this server as a data source for data visualization.

Grafana Loki

Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It will be used to aggregate the logs produced by Hermes.

Promtail

Promtail is an agent which ships the contents of local logs to a private Grafana Loki instance or Grafana Cloud. It is usually deployed to every machine that has applications needed to be monitored. You will use it to ship Hermes' logs to Loki.

NOTE: You will redirect hermes' output to /var/log/hermes.log. The configuration we provide ships every log file in /var/log to Loki.

Setup Grafana

Installation

Download docker-compose.yaml, prometheus.yml and grafana_template.json and place them in the same repository.
Run the following command in your command line to start Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Promtail.
```
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yaml up
```

Open your web browser and go to http://localhost:3000/.
On the sign-in page, enter admin for the username and password.
Click Sign in. If successful, you will see a prompt to change the password.
Click OK on the prompt and change your password.

Add Prometheus

In the sidebar, hover your cursor over the Configuration (gear) icon, and then select Data Sources.
Click Add data source.
In the list of data sources, select Prometheus.
In the URL box, enter http://prometheus:9090.
Click Save & Test. Prometheus is now available as a data source in Grafana.

Add Loki

Add another data source, however, this time, select Loki.
In the URL box, enter http://loki:3100.
Click Save & Test. Loki is now available as a data source in Grafana.

Set up the dashboard

Download the Grafana template we provide.
In the sidebar, hover your cursor over the + icon, and then click Import.
Click on Upload JSON file and select the Grafana template you just downloaded.
On the Import page, enter Hermes dashboard template as a name, enter your data sources and click Import.
In the top right corner, next to the refresh dashboard button, select 5s to automatically query Prometheus and Loki every 5s.

Next steps

In the next section, you will learn how to set up Hermes on production chains.

Hermes (IBC Relayer CLI) Documentation