How To Monitor MongoDB: BindPlane for Stackdriver

Update: Google Stackdriver is now Google Cloud Logging and Google Cloud Monitoring. BindPlane will continue to integrate and support both of these products.

Monitoring MongoDB Made easy

Maintaining the health and performance of your IT infrastructure can be one of the biggest headaches you face in your time as an IT professional. With so many moving parts it can be nearly impossible to keep track of them all and how they interact with each other making it quite difficult to efficiently and successfully monitor MongoDB. One day you may log into your MongoDB environment and it’s not returning your queries, or you’re not getting the results you expected. Now you have to figure out why this is happening, is it a network issue? Have you run out of disk space or other resources? Have your files within MongoDB somehow been corrupted? Is there even a malicious DDOS attack being carried out against your organization? Now you have to go through and troubleshoot to try and find the underlying cause. Well with BindPlane all of those hours of troubleshooting are a thing of the past. Here we will show you how BindPlane with Stackdriver will make it easier to monitor MongoDB.

Centralized Monitoring with BindPlane

BindPlane is a monitoring solution that integrates all of your monitoring needs into a single, centralized location. BindPlane lets you integrate the monitoring of everything from the fan speed of hardware your database is hosted on, to tracking each individual user that access your database and the documents they query into a single Destination. BindPlane integrates MongoDB into a monitoring destination of your choice such as Google Stackdriver, New Relic, Azure, Wavefront and others.

BindPlane’s UI gives you the ability to see how many metrics are being sent from MongoDB to your destination, the metrics per minute, and helps you easily see if data stops flowing from your source to your destination.

Within BindPlane, you can also set up resource types with different keys, separating your metrics into different categories, allowing you to track different metrics for different resources. In this section of BindPlane, you can enable the different KPI and non-KPI metrics you would like to collect and monitor.  

Metrics can be sent to any destination you choose, but today we are going to focus more on using BindPlane’s integration with Google Stackdriver to monitor MongoDB.

Monitor MongoDB with Detailed Dashboards and Metrics

When you monitor MongoDB with Stackdriver through BindPlane, you gain the ability to send detailed metrics to Google Stackdriver and create custom dashboards that give you the ability to visualize your data in real time, allowing you closely monitor important Key performance indicators (KPI) and to compare and analyze the data to gain a deeper insight into your system’s performance. You can create dashboard to visualize metrics within MongoDB such as disk Space, CPU usage, connection count, available connection count, number of queries and pretty much any part of your environment that you want to monitor. Being able to easily keep track of these metrics will help you stay proactive when it comes to keeping your environment running efficiently, and letting you avoid sifting through all of the symptoms of the problem, getting you directly to the source of your problem in a fraction of the time, saving you time, money and resources.

Google Stackdriver has the ability to create alerts for your environment. These alerts will monitor MongoDB for when any thresholds that you have set are exceeded, such as storage, temperature, down time, etc. furthering your ability to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to dealing with any problems.

When you are ready to monitor MongoDB with BindPlane metrics, visit our first-time setup blog, or our how-to set up BindPlane metrics video for a step-by-step tutorial on how to get started.

Monitor MongoDB with BindPlane Logs

An exclusive feature to BindPlane for Stackdriver  is BindPlane allows you to integrate your MongoDB source into Google Stackdriver Logging, helping you to better understand the performance, and health of your system through the use of logs, log-based metrics, and alerts. BindPlane logs can be used to track numerous events within the MongoDB environment to let you know when something may need your attention. Google Stackdriver Logging can be used to monitor MongoDB events that you may consider integral to the performance and health of your system, for example a few events that you may want to use logs to track would be:

• When users input queries and notify when a return fails
• Track when files are replicated and if they fail to replicate.
• Send a log for every time an index is created
• Successful and failed authentications
• Alerts can also be set up to notify you about failures such as a primary replication failure and when a secondary replication is designated as a new primary
• Set an alert for when capped collections are hit.

Monitor MongoDB With Log-based metrics and alerts

Another great feature you get when you monitor MongoDB with BindPlane and Stackdriver is the ability to create log-based metrics. Just like with metrics, Log-based metrics allow you to create graphs that allow you to visualize the logs being sent from MongoDB to Stackdriver, giving you a clean, easy to read dashboard to display your log data. Using these log-based metrics can assist you when trying to understand the patterns in the volume and time periods when certain log events occur.

Alerts can also be configured for each of these log-based metrics, letting you know when a threshold has been hit, down-time alerts, or a specific incident you are monitoring for occurs.

For help getting started monitoring MongoDB with logs, check out our video tutorial and How-to blog!

Get Started Today

BindPlane is capable of monitoring more than 150 sources and can provide valuable insights into your IT environments daily activities, to help you find the root of your problems, and help you be proactive to avoid any issues in the future. If you are a Google Stackdriver user, you can activate BindPlane at no extra cost. To start your free trial today, visit our website for more information and how to get started.