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Viewing Metrics in Grafana

Once you've started the gateway with the metrics profile, follow these steps to view component metrics:

Step 1: Access Grafana

Open your browser and navigate to: http://localhost:3000

Step 2: Log in to Grafana

  1. Username: admin
  2. Password: admin

Note: You'll be prompted to change the password on first login.

Step 3: Navigate to Dashboards

  1. Click on the hamburger menu (☰) in the top-left corner
  2. Navigate to Dashboards → Browse
  3. You'll see several pre-built dashboards:
  4. Infrastructure Overview: High-level view of all components
  5. Gateway Controller: Detailed gateway-controller metrics
  6. Policy Engine: Detailed policy-engine metrics

Step 4: View Infrastructure Overview

The Infrastructure Overview dashboard provides a comprehensive view:

Gateway Controller Section

  • API Operations: Total operations and operation rate
  • Deployment Latency: End-to-end deployment time
  • xDS Clients: Number of connected Envoy routers
  • Database Operations: Database operation metrics
  • HTTP Requests: REST API request metrics

Policy Engine Section

  • Request Processing: Total requests and request rate
  • Policy Executions: Policy execution metrics
  • Active Streams: Current ext_proc streams
  • Errors: Error rate and types

System Resources

  • Memory Usage: Heap, system memory across components
  • Goroutines: Go runtime goroutines count
  • Uptime: Component availability

Step 5: View Gateway Controller Dashboard

The Gateway Controller dashboard provides detailed metrics:

API Management

  • API Operations Total: Counter for all API operations with labels for:
  • operation: create, update, delete, get
  • status: success, failure
  • api_type: REST, GraphQL, etc.
  • APIs Total: Gauge showing deployed APIs by type and status
  • Deployment Latency Seconds: Histogram of deployment times

xDS Metrics

  • xDS Clients Connected: Gauge of connected Envoy instances
  • Snapshot Generation Duration: Time to generate configuration snapshots
  • XDS Stream Requests: Counter for xDS requests by type
  • Snapshot Size: Size of generated configuration snapshots

Database Metrics

  • Database Operations Total: Counter for database operations
  • Database Operation Duration: Histogram of operation times
  • Database Size Bytes: Current database size

HTTP API Metrics

  • HTTP Requests Total: Counter for REST API requests
  • HTTP Request Duration: Histogram of API response times
  • Concurrent Requests: Current concurrent API requests

Step 6: View Policy Engine Dashboard

The Policy Engine dashboard provides detailed metrics:

Request Processing

  • Requests Total: Counter for all processed requests with labels:
  • phase: request, response
  • route: route name
  • api_name: API identifier
  • api_version: API version
  • Request Duration Seconds: Histogram of request processing times
  • Request Errors Total: Counter for errors by type

Policy Execution

  • Policy Executions Total: Counter for policy executions with labels:
  • policy_name: Name of executed policy
  • policy_version: Policy version
  • api: API identifier
  • route: Route name
  • status: success, failure, skip
  • Policy Duration Seconds: Histogram of policy execution times
  • Policies Per Chain: Gauge of current policy chain lengths

Streaming

  • Active Streams: Current ext_proc streams (gauge)
  • XDS Updates Total: Counter for configuration updates
  • Body Bytes Processed: Counter for body processing

System Resources

  • Memory Usage: Memory consumption metrics
  • Goroutines: Current goroutines count
  • GRPC Connections: Active gRPC connections

Step 7: Create Custom Dashboards

You can create custom dashboards in Grafana:

  1. Click + → Dashboard
  2. Click + Add visualization
  3. Select Prometheus as the data source
  4. Write PromQL queries to fetch metrics
  5. Configure visualization (graphs, tables, gauges, etc.)
  6. Save the dashboard

Step 8: Set Up Alerts

Create alerts to be notified of issues:

  1. Navigate to Alerting → Alert rules
  2. Click + New alert rule
  3. Define the alert condition using PromQL
  4. Set severity (Critical, Warning, Info)
  5. Configure notifications (email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.)
  6. Save the alert rule

Example alert for high error rate: 

(
  rate(gateway_controller_api_operations_total{status="failure"}[5m])
  /
  rate(gateway_controller_api_operations_total[5m])
) > 0.1

This alert triggers when the error rate exceeds 10% over 5 minutes.