If you want to export your FreeNAS1 reporting information to some kind of monitor/collector, graphite is how its done.
FreeNAS has this ability baked in. It used to be under System -> Advanced, now its under System -> Reporting. The only thing you need to do is plug in the IP of your graphite endpoint (it uses the default port, not configurable).
Checking our work
Now you need to go to your endpoint where the data is being collected. Previously, I setup an InfluxDB2 to collect graphite stats, so I’ll use that.
root@monitoring:~ # influx
Connected to http://localhost:8086 version 1.8.0
InfluxDB shell version: 1.8.0
> show databases
name: databases
name
----
graphite
_internal
> use graphite
Using database graphite
> show series
key
---
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-average.percent-idle
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-average.percent-interrupt
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-average.percent-nice
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-average.percent-system
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-average.percent-user
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-sum.percent-idle
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-sum.percent-interrupt
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-sum.percent-nice
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-sum.percent-system
servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-sum.percent-user
...
> select * from "servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-average.percent-idle" limit 2
name: servers.freenas1_cmhome.aggregation-cpu-average.percent-idle
time value
---- -----
1595976499000000000 96.5330779740442
1595976519000000000 96.6526591091007
>
We can see that FreeNAS is exporting the data to InfluxDB and its being stored as series. We can then see that there is in fact data being stored in the series. I’ve limited the output to 2 for readability.
Conclusion
You now have data being exported from FreeNAS and being stored in InfluxDB. Next up, we need a way to visualize the data we’re collecting.
