Monitoring Cloud Foundry with Grafana and Prometheus - Architecture

Monitoring Cloud Foundry with Grafana and Prometheus involves collecting, storing, and visualizing metrics to enhance observability and manage the Cloud Foundry environment effectively.

1. Install and Configure Prometheus

• Set up Prometheus: Deploy Prometheus in Kubernetes, ensuring it has access to the Cloud Foundry metric endpoints.
• Scrape Cloud Foundry Metrics: Use the CF Exporter, Firehose Exporter or Nozzle Exporter to pull metrics from the Cloud Foundry. 

2. Install and Configure Thanos

• Thanos is an aggregator of multiple Prometheus instances

3. Set up Grafana

• Install Grafana on Kubernetes
• Add Prometheus as a Data Source.
• Create dashboards

Grafana FAQ

What is Grafana?

Grafana is open source visualization and alerting tool. It is widely used for interactive dashboards.

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is a time-series database

What is Thanos?

Thanos is an aggregator of multiple Prometheus instances

What is pull-based model in Prometheus?

Prometheus collects metrics from defined endpoint. It scrapes data  on a configured interval. Architecturally, its a pull-based model rather than push/insert data.

What are the exporters and examples? 

• Blackbox exporters
• Firehose exporters
• cf exporters

Cloud Foundry FAQ

What is Cloud Foundry?

Cloud Foundry is an open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) for hosting stateless applications or microservices.

What is the ideal workload for Cloud Foundry?

12-factor compliant applications are the ideal workloads for running on Cloud Foundry.

Why are developers preferring Kubernetes over Cloud Foundry?

Downloading and configuring Cloud Foundry requires deep infrastructure knowledge (Bosch) and it also requires dedicated infrastructure resources.

When it comes to Kubernetes, it's much easier to consume. It can be configured on a laptop. It is well documented and has a fast learning curve compared to Cloud Foundry.

What is the advantage of Cloud Foundry?

Cloud Foundry is a proven platform/technology, works at scale and hassle free for developers.

It simplifies application deployment through “cf push”, by allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than worry about underline infrastructure.

What are the disadvantages of Cloud Foundry?

Cloud Foundry is designed for 12-factor compliant applications, which are stateless. 

Large corporations have thousands of legacy stateful applications or monoliths and it can be an obstacle for running on Cloud Foundry. 

Kubernetes allows deployment of legacy stateful applications without modifying them.

What is Korifi?

Korifi is the convergence of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes.

It brings the best of both worlds - Developer experience of Cloud Foundry and power of Kubernetes. Deployed applications run on the underline Kubernetes platform.

https://www.cloudfoundry.org/technology/korifi/