Realtime Data Streaming Platform: Building a Unified Monitoring Stack

This guide details building a comprehensive monitoring solution for a high-volume streaming platform using VictoriaMetrics and Grafana. The architecture involves collecting metrics from Pulsar, Flink, and ClickHouse using Prometheus exposition, reporters, and SQL queries. VMAgent gathers these metrics and sends them to VictoriaMetrics for storage, while Grafana provides visualization through pre-built dashboards. The solution utilizes the VictoriaMetrics Kubernetes stack, offering advantages like better compression and faster queries compared to Prometheus. Setting up Flink metrics involves deploying a Prometheus reporter, configuring VMPodScrape for cross-namespace scraping, and installing a ClickHouse plugin for native SQL queries. The guide provides scripts for automating the Flink metrics setup and dashboard importing. Real-time dashboards offer insights into message ingestion, stream processing, and analytical performance, enabling cross-component correlation and capacity planning. Production best practices include enabling persistent storage, organizing dashboards with tags, setting up alerts, and creating custom views. The final workflow involves deploying Pulsar with the VictoriaMetrics stack, setting up Flink metrics integration, importing custom dashboards, and accessing Grafana for daily operations.