How to Enable Ceph Enterprise Monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana

In today’s data‑driven world, ensuring efficient and secure storage systems is critical; Ceph provides an open‑source distributed storage solution with a powerful monitoring panel for cluster health and performance.

Prevention is better than cure – monitor first.

1. Enable Ceph monitoring

<code>$ ceph mgr module enable prometheus</code>

Tip: If the mgr host lacks the cherrypy module, the command will fail.

Solution:

<code>pip3 install cherrypy -i https://mirrors.aliyun.com/pypi/simple/
sudo systemctl restart ceph-mgr.target</code>

2. Enable RBD monitoring

<code>$ ceph config set mgr mgr/prometheus/rbd_stats_pools "kubernetes,cephfs-data,cephfs-metadata"</code>

Tip: To monitor all RBD pools, set the value to "*".

Prometheus collection of Ceph metrics

Edit the Prometheus ConfigMap to add a job named “ceph” with the target nodes:

<code>$ kubectl -n kube-system edit cm prometheus
  - job_name: 'ceph'
    static_configs:
    - targets:
      - "172.139.20.20:9283"
      - "172.139.20.208:9283"
      - "172.139.20.94:9283"</code>

Verify collection success with curl:

<code>$ curl -s $(kubectl -n kube-system get svc prometheus -ojsonpath='{.spec.clusterIP}:{.spec.ports[0].port}')/prometheus/api/v1/query --data-urlencode 'query=up{job=~"ceph.*"}' | jq '.data.result[] | {job: .metric.job, instance: .metric.instance ,status: .value[1]}'</code>

Sample output shows each Ceph instance returning status “1”.

Grafana: add Ceph monitoring dashboards

Download the official Ceph dashboard files from the Ceph repository:

https://github.com/ceph/ceph/tree/main/monitoring/ceph-mixin/dashboards_out

Tip: The dashboards rely on node‑exporter metrics.

Conclusion

Ceph’s enterprise‑grade monitoring panel is essential for managing large‑scale distributed storage, improving reliability and efficiency while safeguarding data assets; proper configuration and continuous optimization enable stable operation and support business growth in digital transformation.