NSQ integration for Grafana Cloud

NSQ is a realtime distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day.

This integration uses NSQ statsd integration to gather metrics.

This integration includes 2 useful alerts and 2 pre-built dashboards to help monitor and visualize NSQ metrics.

Before you begin

In order for the integration to work, point nsqd to Grafana Agent statsd exporter with -statsd-address, using nsqd command line flags, like this:

nsqd -statsd-address=agent.default.svc.cluster.local:9125

To enable e2e metrics with extra flags:

nsqd -e2e-processing-latency-percentile=1.0,0.99,0.95 -e2e-processing-latency-window-time=1m0s

To learn more, see end-to-end processing latency in nsq.

Install NSQ integration for Grafana Cloud

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Connections in the left-hand menu.
Find NSQ and click its tile to open the integration.
Review the prerequisites in the Configuration Details tab and set up Grafana Agent to send NSQ metrics to your Grafana Cloud instance.
Click Install to add this integration’s pre-built dashboards and alerts to your Grafana Cloud instance, and you can start monitoring your NSQ setup.

Post-install configuration for the NSQ integration

This integration is configured to work with the statsd_exporter, which is embedded in Grafana Agent.

Enable the integration by adding the provided snippets to your agent configuration file.

For a full description of configuration options see how to configure the statsd_exporter_config block in the agent documentation.

Configuration snippets for Grafana Agent

Below integrations, insert the following lines and change the URLs according to your environment:

  statsd_exporter:
    enabled: true
    metric_relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [exported_job]
        target_label: job
        replacement: 'integrations/$1'
      - source_labels: [exported_instance]
        target_label: instance
      - regex: (exported_instance|exported_job)
        action: labeldrop
    mapping_config:
      defaults:
        match_type: glob
        glob_disable_ordering: false
        ttl: 1m30s
      mappings:
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.channel.*.message_count"
        name: "nsq_topic_channel_message_count"
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
          channel: "$3"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.channel.*.requeue_count"
        name: "nsq_topic_channel_requeue_count"
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
          channel: "$3"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.channel.*.timeout_count"
        name: "nsq_topic_channel_timeout_count"
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
          channel: "$3"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.channel.*.*"
        name: "nsq_topic_channel_${4}"
        match_metric_type: gauge
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
          channel: "$3"
  
      #nsq.<nsq_host>_<nsq_port>.topic.<topic_name>.backend_depth [gauge]
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.message_count"
        name: "nsq_topic_message_count"
        help: Total number of messages for the topic
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.message_bytes"
        name: "nsq_topic_message_bytes"
        help: Total number of bytes of all messages
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.*" #depth or backend_depth
        name: "nsq_topic_${3}"
        match_metric_type: gauge
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
      # mem
      # nsq.<nsq_host>_<nsq_port>.mem.gc_runs
      - match: "nsq.*.mem.gc_runs"
        name: "nsq_mem_gc_runs"
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.mem.*"
        name: "nsq_mem_${2}"
        match_metric_type: gauge
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"

Full example configuration for Grafana Agent

Refer to the following Grafana Agent configuration for a complete example that contains all the snippets used for the NSQ integration. This example also includes metrics that are sent to monitor your Grafana Agent instance.

integrations:
  agent:
    enabled: true
    relabel_configs:
    - action: replace
      source_labels:
      - agent_hostname
      target_label: instance
    - action: replace
      target_label: job
      replacement: "integrations/agent-check"
    metric_relabel_configs:
    - action: keep
      regex: (prometheus_target_.*|prometheus_sd_discovered_targets|agent_build.*|agent_wal_samples_appended_total|process_start_time_seconds)
      source_labels:
      - __name__
  statsd_exporter:
    enabled: true
    metric_relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [exported_job]
        target_label: job
        replacement: 'integrations/$1'
      - source_labels: [exported_instance]
        target_label: instance
      - regex: (exported_instance|exported_job)
        action: labeldrop
    mapping_config:
      defaults:
        match_type: glob
        glob_disable_ordering: false
        ttl: 1m30s
      mappings:
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.channel.*.message_count"
        name: "nsq_topic_channel_message_count"
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
          channel: "$3"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.channel.*.requeue_count"
        name: "nsq_topic_channel_requeue_count"
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
          channel: "$3"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.channel.*.timeout_count"
        name: "nsq_topic_channel_timeout_count"
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
          channel: "$3"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.channel.*.*"
        name: "nsq_topic_channel_${4}"
        match_metric_type: gauge
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
          channel: "$3"
  
      #nsq.<nsq_host>_<nsq_port>.topic.<topic_name>.backend_depth [gauge]
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.message_count"
        name: "nsq_topic_message_count"
        help: Total number of messages for the topic
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.message_bytes"
        name: "nsq_topic_message_bytes"
        help: Total number of bytes of all messages
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.topic.*.*" #depth or backend_depth
        name: "nsq_topic_${3}"
        match_metric_type: gauge
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
          topic: "$2"
      # mem
      # nsq.<nsq_host>_<nsq_port>.mem.gc_runs
      - match: "nsq.*.mem.gc_runs"
        name: "nsq_mem_gc_runs"
        match_metric_type: counter
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
  
      - match: "nsq.*.mem.*"
        name: "nsq_mem_${2}"
        match_metric_type: gauge
        labels:
          instance: "$1"
          job: "nsq"
  prometheus_remote_write:
  - basic_auth:
      password: <your_prom_pass>
      username: <your_prom_user>
    url: <your_prom_url>
logs:
  configs:
  - clients:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_loki_pass>
        username: <your_loki_user>
      url: <your_loki_url>
    name: integrations
    positions:
      filename: /tmp/positions.yaml
    scrape_configs:
metrics:
  configs:
  - name: integrations
    remote_write:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_prom_pass>
        username: <your_prom_user>
      url: <your_prom_url>
    scrape_configs:
  global:
    scrape_interval: 60s
  wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-wal

Dashboards

The NSQ integration installs the following dashboards in your Grafana Cloud instance to help monitor your system.

NSQ Instances
NSQ Topics

NSQ topics dashboard

NSQ instances dashboard

Alerts

The NSQ integration includes the following useful alerts:

Alert	Description
NsqTopicDepthIncreasing	Critical: Topic depth is increasing.
NsqChannelDepthIncreasing	Critical: Topic channel depth is increasing.

Metrics

The most important metrics provided by the NSQ integration, which are used on the pre-built dashboards and Prometheus alerts, are as follows:

nsq_mem_gc_pause_usec_100
nsq_mem_gc_pause_usec_95
nsq_mem_gc_pause_usec_99
nsq_mem_heap_idle_bytes
nsq_mem_heap_in_use_bytes
nsq_mem_heap_objects
nsq_mem_heap_released_bytes
nsq_mem_next_gc_bytes
nsq_topic_backend_depth
nsq_topic_channel_backend_depth
nsq_topic_channel_clients
nsq_topic_channel_deferred_count
nsq_topic_channel_depth
nsq_topic_channel_e2e_processing_latency_99
nsq_topic_channel_in_flight_count
nsq_topic_channel_message_count
nsq_topic_channel_requeue_count
nsq_topic_channel_timeout_count
nsq_topic_depth
nsq_topic_e2e_processing_latency_99
nsq_topic_message_bytes
nsq_topic_message_count

Changelog

# 0.0.1 - January 2022

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your NSQ instance to Grafana Cloud, you might incur charges. To view information on the number of active series that your Grafana Cloud account uses for metrics included in each Cloud tier, see Active series and dpm usage and Cloud tier pricing.