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Memcached integration for Grafana Cloud

Memcached is a distributed, in-memory key-value store used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching information in memory.

This integration includes 3 useful alerts and 1 pre-built dashboard to help monitor and visualize Memcached metrics.

Before you begin

This integration relies on Grafana Agent installed along Memcached node. See the following sections for details.

Install Memcached integration for Grafana Cloud

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

Post-install configuration for the Memcached integration

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

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

Make sure to change the memcached_address to the address of the memcached server you want to monitor.

For a full description of configuration options see how to configure the memcached_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:

yaml
  memcached_exporter:
    enabled: true
    memcached_address: localhost:11211
    instance: '<your-instance-name>'

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 Memcached integration. This example also includes metrics that are sent to monitor your Grafana Agent instance.

yaml
integrations:
  prometheus_remote_write:
  - basic_auth:
      password: <your_prom_pass>
      username: <your_prom_user>
    url: <your_prom_url>
  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_sync_length_seconds_sum|prometheus_target_scrapes_.*|prometheus_target_interval.*|prometheus_sd_discovered_targets|agent_build.*|agent_wal_samples_appended_total|process_start_time_seconds)
      source_labels:
      - __name__
  # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `integrations` section.
  # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
  memcached_exporter:
    enabled: true
    memcached_address: localhost:11211
    instance: '<your-instance-name>'
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:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `logs.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
metrics:
  configs:
  - name: integrations
    remote_write:
    - basic_auth:
        password: <your_prom_pass>
        username: <your_prom_user>
      url: <your_prom_url>
    scrape_configs:
      # Add here any snippet that belongs to the `metrics.configs.scrape_configs` section.
      # For a correct indentation, paste snippets copied from Grafana Cloud at the beginning of the line.
  global:
    scrape_interval: 60s
  wal_directory: /tmp/grafana-agent-wal

Dashboards

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

  • Memcached Overview

Memcached overview

Memcached overview

Alerts

The Memcached integration includes the following useful alerts:

AlertDescription
MemcachedDownCritical: Memcached instance is down.
MemcachedConnectionLimitApproachingWarning: Memcached max connection limit is approaching.
MemcachedConnectionLimitApproachingCritical: Memcached connections at critical level.

Metrics

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

  • memcached_commands_total
  • memcached_connections_total
  • memcached_current_bytes
  • memcached_current_connections
  • memcached_current_items
  • memcached_items_evicted_total
  • memcached_items_total
  • memcached_max_connections
  • memcached_read_bytes_total
  • memcached_up
  • memcached_uptime_seconds
  • memcached_version
  • memcached_written_bytes_total

Changelog

md
# 0.0.5 - September 2023

* New Filter Metrics option for configuring the Grafana Agent, which saves on metrics cost by dropping any metric not used by this integration. Beware that anything custom built using metrics that are not on the snippet will stop working.
* New hostname relabel option, which applies the instance name you write on the text box to the Grafana Agent configuration snippets, making it easier and less error prone to configure this mandatory label.

# 0.0.4 - December 2022

* Update mixin to latest version
* Add screenshot

# 0.0.3 - September 2022

* Update dashboard panels descriptions.

# 0.0.2 - October 2021

* Update mixin to latest version:
  - Update queries to use $__rate_interval

# 0.0.1 - November 2020

* Initial release

Cost

By connecting your Memcached 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.