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The Service stores metrics data to an InfluxDB service with a default retention policy of 24 hours. This may not be long enough time for your use cases. This document will show with examples how to store metrics data for a longer period of time, and how to configure Grafana to display it.

The theory

To store measurements for a longer time, it must be stored with a Retention Policy of desired length. It doesn’t make sense to store ALL data for the specified time: When Grafana shows values from a month in a graph, it physically cannot display data at 50 millisecond accuracy. Having a lot of data at very short intervals takes a lot of processing, bandwidth and disk space. So you must think about downsampling the data as well.

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This existing continuous query data can be used in Grafana with the following configuration:

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Creating a custom RP and CQ

Let’s suppose there isn’t a CQ and RP that meet our requirements.

Requirements

We need to have a Grafana display which shows Management API request counts by path, and we need to show data for the last 30 days.

What we already have

We can show a graph for the last 24 hours with the following Grafana Panel configuration:

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The essential info we see from this configuration is:

• Data is stored with the default retention policy (which we know is one_day by using the show retention policies command) with measurement name mgmg_api_request.

• There’s a field or tag called auth_header_exists, and in this graph we display the number of them by using the count() function.

• We group by time and also the tag path.

• The path tag is also used as an alias, the value of which is shown in the legend.

Create a Retention Policy

We need a retention policy that is at least 30 days long. Let’s see what is available:

> show retention policies
name       duration   shardGroupDuration replicaN default
----       --------   ------------------ -------- -------
autogen    0s         168h0m0s           1        false
five_years 43680h0m0s 168h0m0s           1        false
one_day    24h0m0s    1h0m0s             1        true
one_year   8736h0m0s  168h0m0s           1        false

We see that one_day is indeed the default, and the next longest is one_year. Since that is too long, we should create a new RP called one_month that has a duration of 30 days, or 720 hours.

> CREATE RETENTION POLICY "one_month" ON "oneportal" DURATION 720h REPLICATION 1

Now we can confirm that it was added.

> show retention policies
name       duration   shardGroupDuration replicaN default
----       --------   ------------------ -------- -------
autogen    0s         168h0m0s           1        false
five_years 43680h0m0s 168h0m0s           1        false
one_day    24h0m0s    1h0m0s             1        true
one_year   8736h0m0s  168h0m0s           1        false
one_month  720h0m0s   24h0m0s            1        false

Create a Continuous Query