Datadog on Raspberry Pi: Enabling Network and Process Metrics

Table of Contents

Empty graphs in Datadog after installing the agent on a Raspberry Pi?
I experienced this and fixed it by installing a couple of things…

Datadog on a Raspberry Pi? #

A little while ago I installed a Datadog monitoring agent on my Raspberry Pi - partly because I discovered this was possible, but mostly because I wanted to be able to know if my always-on pi was indeed still on. Opting for an advanced monitoring agent like this for a relatively basic task may seem like overkill but as I rather enjoy playing with graphs it was an obvious choice for me. Plus, I’d seen a little of Datadog’s capabilities at work and was aware of the possibilities - also the inspiring Pokemon Go status dashboard had recently come into existence (which was a lot more extensive than it is now!).

As the title hints, I needed to do something extra to “fix some broken metrics” - not everything was automagically instrumented as is generally described by these software vendors. If you find that nearly everything is working out-of-the-box after installing the agent but the Network traffic (bytes per sec) and Process memory usage graphs are empty in the Datadog console, then maybe the scenario below will apply to you…

Note: this was for Raspbian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie)

The Network Metrics #

The install log file has error(s) containing "No module named psutil"

– Install missing module

$ sudo apt-get install python-psutil

– Reinstall agent

Your Network traffic graph is now working!
-or-
Your Network traffic graph is… still empty.

If you have already installed header files during a previous endeavour your problem might be solved by installing only python-psutil - if not, you can probably find this next error…

The install log file now has error(s) containing "Python.h: no such file or directory"

– Install missing header files

$ sudo apt-get install \
python-dev \
libpython-dev \
libpython2.7-dev \
python2.7-dev

– Reinstall agent

Your Network traffic graph is now working!

Still got an empty Network graph? #

According to my slighly sparse notes I had also ran $ pip install datadog by the time I had fixed the Network traffic graph (and before I’d fixed the Process graph) - though I’m unsure that this helped. If your graphs are still not populating, then maybe $ pip install datadog did help me…

The Process Metrics #

The /var/log/syslog file has error(s) containing "ohai file not found"

– Install a go environment

$ wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.7.4.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
$ sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzvf go1.7.4.linux-armv6l.tar.gz

(these were helpful)
https://dave.cheney.net/2012/09/25/installing-go-on-the-raspberry-pi
https://dave.cheney.net/unofficial-arm-tarballs

– Ensure go environment is in the $PATH for account running agent

$ mkdir ~/go
$ vi ~/.profile
>   export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
>   export GOPATH=$HOME/go
>   export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

As I was running the agent as root… this was root’s home directory. This was ok until the Raspberry Pi was restarted - root doesn’t actually login so the contents of ~/.profile are not read. Adding the same export commands to /etc/rc.local allowed root to find the go environment during boot time.

– Install gohai

$ go get github.com/DataDog/gohai

– Restart Raspberry Pi (possibly not necessary - I was ensuring agent started correctly at boot time too)

Your Process memory graph is now working!

Well… #

Hopefully.

Disclaimer #

This was my experience after installing the Datadog agent available at the time on to recently installed Raspbian operating system. Things may differ on other or newer versions of the agent / Raspbian / go … (this post remained in draft status for a little while, so latest/recent = some time around Nov-Dec 2016 …)

Bonus #

If you’ve read this all the way to the end then this will almost certainly interest you:

https://medium.com/@aubronw/the-perfect-dashboard-tv-resin-io-datadog-rpi-chromecast-d52f110bea8

I found this post when dusting off this draft, which led to tangenting into resin… and another draft. Expect to read something about resin on here in the future!