AppDynamics HAProxy Monitoring Extension

Use Case

HAProxy is an open source, high performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer commonly used to improve the performance of web sites and services by spreading requests across multiple servers. The HAProxy Monitoring extension collects key metrics from HAProxy Load balancer of the underlying proxies/servers and presents them to the AppDynamics Metric Browser.

Prerequisites

HAProxy Monitoring Extension works with HAProxy v1.3 and above.

1. Before the extension is installed, the prerequisites mentioned here need to be met. Please do not proceed with the extension installation if the specified prerequisites are not met.
2. The extension needs to be able to connect to the HAProxy in order to collect and send metrics. To do this, you will have to either establish a remote connection in between the extension and the product, or have an agent on the same machine running the product in order for the extension to collect and send the metrics.

Installation

1. Run 'mvn clean install' from "HAProxyMonitorRepo"
2. Unzip the HAProxyMonitor-VERSION.zip from target directory into the "<MachineAgent_Dir>/monitors" directory.
3. Edit the file config.yml as described below in Configuration Section, located in <MachineAgent_Dir>/monitors/HAProxyMonitor and update the server(s) details.
4. All metrics to be reported are configured in metrics.xml. Users can remove entries from metrics.xml to stop the metric from reporting, or add new entries as well.
5. Restart the Machine Agent.

Please place the extension in the "monitors" directory of your Machine Agent installation directory. Do not place the extension in the "extensions" directory of your Machine Agent installation directory.

Configuration

Config.yml

Configure the extension by editing the config.yml file in <MACHINE_AGENT_HOME>/monitors/HAProxyMonitor/.

1. Configure the "COMPONENT_ID" under which the metrics need to be reported. This can be done by changing the value of <COMPONENT_ID> in metricPrefix: Server|Component:<COMPONENT_ID>|Custom Metrics|HAProxy|.
   For example,

   metricPrefix: "Server|Component:100|Custom Metrics|HAProxy|"
   

More details around metric prefix can be found here.

2. The extension supports reporting metrics from multiple HAProxy instances. The monitor provides an option to add HAProxy server/s for monitoring the metrics provided by the particular end-point. Have a look at config.yml for more details.
   For example:

   metricPrefix: "Server|Component:<COMPONENT_ID>|Custom Metrics|HAProxy|"
   servers:
     - displayName: "Local HAProxy"
       host: "demo.haproxy.org"
       port: 80
       csvExportUri: ";csv"
       username: ""
       password: ""
       encryptedPassword: ""
       useSSL: false
       #proxyServers can be configured as a list of (pxname-svname) values and are regex supported but do not put ".*" or blank inputs
       proxyServers:
           - pxname: "http.*"      #Put the indivudual pxname. Array of pxname not supported
             svname: ["FRONTEND", ".*-direct", "IPv4-.*"]
           - pxname: "www"
             svname: ["b.*"]
   connection:
     connectTimeout: 10000
     socketTimeout: 10000
   
   #Encryption key for Encrypted password.
   encryptionKey: ""
   

3. Configure the numberOfThreads.
   For example,
   If number of servers that need to be monitored is 5, then number of threads required is 5 * 1 = 5

   numberOfThreads: 5
   

Metrics.xml

You can add/remove metrics of your choice by modifying the provided metrics.xml file. This file consists of all the metrics that will be monitored and sent to the controller. Please look how the metrics have been defined and follow the same convention, when adding new metrics. You do have the ability to choose your Rollup types as well as set an alias that you would like to be displayed on the metric browser.

Metric Stat Configuration: Add the metric to be monitored under the metric tag as shown below.

         <stat name="metrics">
                <metric attr="qcur" alias="queued_requests" column="2" aggregationType = "OBSERVATION" timeRollUpType = "CURRENT" clusterRollUpType = "COLLECTIVE" />
          </stat>

For configuring the metrics, the following properties can be used:

All these metric properties are optional, and the default value shown in the table is applied to the metric (if a property has not been specified) by default.

Metrics

HA-proxy metrics and its description is shown here. For more details, please visit HAProxy Management Guide.

Credentials Encryption

Please visit this page to get detailed instructions on password encryption. The steps in this document will guide you through the whole process.

Extensions Workbench

Workbench is an inbuilt feature provided with each extension in order to assist you to fine tune the extension setup before you actually deploy it on the controller. Please review the following document on How to use the Extensions WorkBench.

Troubleshooting

Please follow the steps listed in this troubleshooting-document in order to troubleshoot your issue. These are a set of common issues that customers might have faced during the installation of the extension.

Contributing

Always feel free to fork and contribute any changes directly here on GitHub.

Version

Note: While extensions are maintained and supported by customers under the open-source licensing model, they interact with agents and Controllers that are subject to AppDynamics’ maintenance and support policy. Some extensions have been tested with AppDynamics 4.5.13+ artifacts, but you are strongly recommended against using versions that are no longer supported.