Installation Options

Besides freedom of choosing from a set of metric measurements storage options one can also choose how is the monitoring configuration (connect strings, metric sets and intervals) going to be stored.

Configuration database based operation

This is the original central pull mode depicted on the architecture diagram. It requires a small schema to be rolled out on any Postgres database accessible to the metrics gathering daemon, which will hold the connect strings, metric definition SQLs and preset configurations and some other more minor attributes. For rollout details see the custom installation chapter.

The default Docker demo image cybertecpostgresql/pgwatch-demo uses this approach.

File based operation

One can deploy the gatherer daemon(s) decentralized with sources to be monitored defined in simple YAML files. In that case there is no need for the central Postgres configuration database. See the sample.sources.yaml config file for an example.

Note

In this mode you also may want, but not forced, to point out the path to metric definition YAML file when starting the gatherer. Also note that the configuration system supports multiple YAML files in a folder so that you could easily programmatically manage things via Ansible, for example, and you can also use environment variables inside YAML files.