Quickstart

1. Configuration file

Harvest's configuration information is defined in harvest.yml. There are a few ways to tell Harvest how to load this file:

• If you don't use the --config flag, the harvest.yml file located in the current working directory will be used

• If you specify the --config flag like so harvest status --config /opt/harvest/harvest.yml, Harvest will use that file

To start collecting metrics, you need to define at least one poller and one exporter in your configuration file. The default configuration comes with a pre-configured poller named unix which collects metrics from the local system. This is useful if you want to monitor resource usage by Harvest and serves as a good example. Feel free to delete it if you want.

The next step is to add pollers for your ONTAP clusters in the Pollers section of the Harvest configuration file, harvest.yml.

2. Start Harvest

Start all Harvest pollers as daemons:

bin/harvest start

Or start a specific poller(s). In this case, we're staring two pollers named jamaica and jamaica.

bin/harvest start jamaica jamaica

Replace jamaica and grenada with the poller names you defined in harvest.yml. The logs of each poller can be found in /var/log/harvest/.

3. Import Grafana dashboards

The Grafana dashboards are located in the $HARVEST_HOME/grafana directory. You can manually import the dashboards or use the bin/harvest grafana command (more documentation).

Note: the current dashboards specify Prometheus as the datasource. If you use the InfluxDB exporter, you will need to create your own dashboards.

4. Verify the metrics

If you use a Prometheus Exporter, open a browser and navigate to http://0.0.0.0:12990/ (replace 12990 with the port number of your poller). This is the Harvest created HTTP end-point for your Prometheus exporter. This page provides a real-time generated list of running collectors and names of exported metrics.

The metric data that is exported for Prometheus to scrap is available at http://0.0.0.0:12990/metrics/.

More information on configuring the exporter can be found in the Prometheus exporter documentation.

If you can't access the URL, check the logs of your pollers. These are located in /var/log/harvest/.

5. (Optional) Setup Systemd service files

If you're running Harvest on a system with Systemd, you may want to take advantage of systemd instantiated units to manage your pollers.