Metrics and Grafana

Castreon publishes Prometheus metrics at the server's /metrics address: the state and health of each channel, bitrate, clients, restarts, DVB signal and errors, server load, the version and the license expiry date. It comes with a ready-made Grafana dashboard.

Setup

Open Settings → Monitoring (Grafana).

1. Prometheus

1. Click Copy the fragment and add it to your Prometheus configuration file (prometheus.yml), under scrape_configs.
2. Add the Prometheus server address to Allowed addresses (also in Settings) — /metrics goes through the same check as the streams.
3. Reload Prometheus. Within a few seconds, the Castreon server appears as an active target.

2. Grafana

1. Click Download the Grafana dashboard.
2. In Grafana: Dashboards → New → Import, upload the downloaded file and choose the Prometheus data source.

The dashboard shows the server, the channels and the DVB sources. Several Castreon servers can be followed in the same dashboard.

Alerts on your phone or by email

Castreon itself does not send notifications outside the panel. For alerts by phone, email, Telegram or Slack, use Alertmanager (Prometheus) or Grafana alerts on top of the Castreon metrics. A few useful rules:

• a channel that has been unhealthy for more than a few minutes;
• DVB continuity errors above a threshold;
• the license expires in less than 7 days (the license expiry metric);
• CPU or memory above 90%.

Security

The metrics contain the channel names and the number of clients. Do not leave /metrics open: restrict it with Allowed addresses to your Prometheus server.