quickstart

Here is how you can get and quickly setup this awesome appliance named PoliGraf.

Step 1: Get PoliGraf

Download OVA appliance – v0.99g “Ravenholm”

SHA1 sum is: a0de5b798852b37d8e675eb59e7b4c7089259e7f poligraf.ova

You can find all release notes on our GitHub Releases page

Default root password is: Sex!Gr@f

Step 2: Deploy

PoliGraf appliance aimed to be deployed on a VMware vSphere™ environment which can be achieve via several ways:

• vSphere client (http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc_50/GUID-6C847F77-8CB2-4187-BD7F-E7D3D5BD897B.html)
• vSphere Web Client (http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-55/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc/GUID-AFEDC48B-C96F-4088-9C1F-4F0A30E965DE.html)
• VMware OVF Tool command-line utility (https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/)
• vSphere HMTL5 Client (https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc/GUID-17BEDA21-43F6-41F4-8FB2-E01D275FE9B4.html)

Step 3: Configure

Starting from version 0.99c you can configure network settings during the deployment step and change them later thanks to OVF properties:

By default, PoliGraf is pre-configured in DHCP mode. If you specify network infromations, the appliance will switch into static mode.

The previous versions of the appliance still relies on the SexiMenu.

Step 4: Add your vCenter/ESXi informations

In order for PoliGraf to retrieve informations and performance counters from your vCenter and ESXi servers, you must add your vCenter/ESXi info and some credential. You can do that very easily as we made some fancy SexiPanel just for you!

Starting from version 0.99g unmanaged ESXi (aka not connected to any vCenter) are supported. The dashboards are the same as the standalone hosts but under “_unmanaged_” vcenter and datacentre.

First of all, connect to your PoliGraf web interface (ie Grafana), which is listening on TCP port 80 so you can reach it at http://your_appliance_fqdn_or_ipv4/ and select the following dashboard: PoliGraf Web Admin. Starting from version 0.99e you can reach your PoliGraf appliance on TCP port 443 as well at https://your_appliance_fqdn_or_ipv4/ thanks to a self-signed that you will be able to change in a future release.

Default login information for web interface is: admin / Sex!Gr@f

Then you’ll just have to click on Credential Store and enter your vCenter/ESXi information (FQDN or IP, username and password). Once you’ve added a vCenter/ESXi, click on the Action dropdown and select Enable VI and Enable VSAN (if you got any VSAN cluster):

And here you are, relax and let the graphing begin! The PoliGraf collector will now retrieve information from your vCenter/ESXi (s) and data will start appearing in graph.

features

PoliGraf is a vSphere centric Graphite appliance with a Grafana frontend. Here is what’s under the hood:

• Carbon is listening on TCP:2003 so you can send any metrics you like in plaintext (like Windows counters…)
• vSphere SDK for Perl is used to pull VI and VSAN metrics from VMware vCenter APIs and pushed to carbon.
• Collectd is here to monitor your PoliGraf appliance (see the Home page) but it will also be used to collect SNMP metrics in the future.
• Grafana uses Graphite-Web APIs to query Whisper files and produce the gorgeous dashboards we love so much!

The heart of PoliGraf is the famous highly scalable real-time graphing system : Graphite. As described by his creator, it consists of three major components:

1. Graphite-Web, a Django-based web application that renders graphs and dashboards
2. The Carbon metric processing daemons
3. The Whisper time-series database library

download

PoliGraf appliance is ready to deploy, you can download it here:

PoliGraf 0.99g

SHA1 sum is: a0de5b798852b37d8e675eb59e7b4c7089259e7f poligraf.ova

licensing

PoliGraf is provided under MIT License, as described here:

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2018 sexibytes

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

PoliGraf will remain a free OSS forever, but using this license will allow us to be named and noticed in case of reuse (don’t look over your shoulder, we saw you ^^).

contact

If you have any issue regarding PoliGraf, an idea of how we could make it better, or if you just want to tell us how you’re using it, feel free to contact us on Twitter or Github, rest assured we will respond to that (yes, we aren’t bots, yet)!

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/poligraf_fr
• Github: https://github.com/sexibytes/poligraf

support us

If this tool was useful for your troubleshooting, or just because you want to join this awesomeness, feel free to support us via:

We also accept any 🍺 of course, we will share it with pleasure with you!