View source for Server Metrics using Prometheus


Prometheus is an "open-source monitoring system with a dimensional data model, flexible query language, efficient time series database and modern alerting approach".

Minetest has built-in support for prometheus, allowing you to see metrics about your server - such as player count and performance information.

Here are some examples of Grafana dashboards created using Prometheus:

- [https://monitor.rubenwardy.com/d/9TgIegyGk/ctf monitor.rubenwardy.com]
- [https://monitoring.minetest.land/ monitoring.minetest.land] (note: this contains heavy mondifications)

== Using Prometheus in Minetest ==

=== Get or build the prometheus-cpp library ===

You may be able to find prometheus-cpp in your distro's package manager. 
Otherwise, you'll need to build it and make it available to Minetest.

Here's how you do that on Linux:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">cd /tmp
git clone --recursive https://github.com/jupp0r/prometheus-cpp
mkdir prometheus-cpp/build
cd prometheus-cpp/build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DENABLE_TESTING=0
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install</syntaxhighlight>

=== Build Minetest ===

Now, you need build minetest with Prometheus enabled

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">cmake . -DENABLE_PROMETHEUS=1
make -j$(nproc)</syntaxhighlight>

=== Configure prometheus ===

Prometheus will make HTTP requests to Minetest's prometheus-cpp library to get the metrics.

You can set the prometheus listen address by assigning an IP:PORT in the minetest.conf:

<code><pre>prometheus_listener_address = 127.0.0.1:30000</pre></code>

== Grafana == 

You can link up Prometheus to Grafana to make nice web graphs. For example:
[https://monitor.rubenwardy.com/d/r6cCl68mk/minetest-servers monitor.rubenwardy.com]

To do: example layouts