Grafana Agent Setup for Lab Nodes Monitoring

Overview

The grafana_agent Ansible role deploys Grafana Agent (static mode) on Lab Nodes to collect system metrics and forward them to a central Mimir instance.

This setup replaces or coexists with the previous Prometheus + node_exporter approach, providing a lightweight agent that pushes metrics into Mimir for long-term storage and Grafana dashboards.

Architecture & Data Flow

   Lab Nodes
      │
      ▼
node_exporter (on every lab node)
      │
      ▼
Grafana Agent (on every lab node)
      │
      ▼  (remote_write over HTTPS)
   Mimir (central instance)
      │
      ▼
 Grafana Dashboards

Components explained:

1. node_exporter

1. Installed on every host (prometheus-node-exporter on Debian/Ubuntu, node_exporter on RedHat via EPEL)
2. Exposes standard host metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network, etc.) on http://localhost:9100/metrics

2. Grafana Agent

1. Lightweight Prometheus-compatible agent
2. Scrapes node_exporter locally from localhost:9100
3. Relabels the instance using the host’s FQDN
4. Forwards all collected metrics to the central Mimir using the remote_write protocol

3. Mimir

1. Central long-term metrics storage backend (Prometheus-compatible)
2. Accepts metrics via the remote_write protocol with basic authentication

Configuration Details

Grafana Agent config (/etc/grafana-agent.yaml on target hosts):

- Global scrape interval: 60s (configurable via scrape_interval_global) - Scrapes the node job from localhost:9100 - Applies relabeling:

1. instance: <fqdn>:9100
2. nodename: <fqdn>

- Forwards metrics to Mimir with basic auth credentials stored in the secrets repository(in mimir_password.yml):

Mimir Endpoints

Internal
https://mimir-jenkins-monitoring.apps.pok.os.sepia.ceph.com/api/v1/push

External
https://mimir.ceph.com/api/v1/push