Performance Monitoring Data Capture

You can capture and monitor the following metrics about the performance of individual machines or your entire fleet:

• Wireless Signal Strength and Quality: signal level, link quality, and noise level
• Memory Usage: memory statistics, including total available memory, used percentage, and specifics on various types of memory (cached, free, slab, etc.)
• CPU Utilization: CPU usage across different states (user, system, idle, etc.)
• Disk I/O: metrics on read and write operations, including bytes transferred and operation times
• Network Traffic: detailed network statistics, including bytes sent and received, packet information, and error counts, providing a deep dive into a device’s network performance

Requirements

To capture data from a machine, you need to create a machine in Viam and follow the setup instructions to install viam-server and connect it to the Viam app.

Add sensor to measure performance metrics

To obtain performance metrics about your machine, use the viam-telegraf-sensor module from the Viam registry. The module provides a sensor that allows you to obtain readings containing your machine’s performance metrics.

1. Go to your machine’s CONFIGURE page. Click the + icon next to your machine part in the left-hand menu and select Component.

2. Then select the viam:viam-sensor:telegrafsensor model from the viam-telegraf-sensor module.

3. Click Add module, then enter a name for your sensor, for example my-telegrafsensor, and click Create.

4. To enable or disable specific metrics, add them to the attributes configuration. For example:

   {
     "disable_kernel": true
   }
   

   See the telegrafsensor module documentation for the full list of attributes available.

5. Save the configuration.

For more information, see add a module from the Viam Registry.

In the next step you will configure the data management service to capture and sync the performance metrics from your configured sensor.

Test sensor data

After you configure your sensor, navigate to the CONTROL tab and select the Sensors dropdown panel. To access detailed readings from your sensor, click on the Get Readings button.

Configure data management service to capture and sync sensor data

To capture the data from your configured sensor, you need to add the data management service and configure it to capture and sync the sensor data:

1. On your machine’s CONFIGURE page, go to the Services subtab and click Create service.
2. Select the data management service and give it a name. For example, data_manager.
3. Click Create.
4. Find your telegrafsensor’s configuration card. In the Data capture section of the sensor’s config, click Add method, select the Readings Method type and set the Frequency to 0.2Hz.
5. Click Save.

View data

View your sensor data on the DATA tab.

Next steps

The data you obtain about your machines is associated with metadata about the machine and time of capture. Once you have captured data about your machines, you can query your captured data with any tools that with SQL or MQL or visualize your data with tools like Grafana:

Query Data

Query tabular data that you have synced to the Viam app using the data management service with SQL or MQL.

Visualize Data

Visualize tabular data from the Viam app using popular tools like Grafana.