[bitfolk] Switching to Prometheus+Grafana for graphing (away…

Hi,

A few customers have been testing this for a while now, and it's
been a while since the last issues were addressed, so now seems like
a good time to announce it.

We're going to be retiring our Cacti instance¹ in favour of the new
setup which can be found at:

    https://tools.bitfolk.com/grafana/

You all already have access to it.

Those who are familiar with Prometheus and Grafana may be a little
disappointed: this is not intended to be a full hosted instance,
only a fairly locked-down replacement for what Cacti provides. I'm
satisfied that it goes beyond the functionality and usability of
Cacti, but it isn't like having your own setup and isn't intended to
be.

Everyone has a default dashboard exposing graphs similar to those
provided by Cacti, plus a few more besides.

The offer was always open for more of your metrics to be graphed by
Cacti, but as of today only one customer was making use of that. The
offer is still open for us to graph extra metrics from you if you
wish. To do that you'll first need to install Node Exporter² and
then send a support ticket. You'll then get an additional
dashboard that looks like a bit like this:

    https://tools.bitfolk.com/grafana/dashboard/snapshot/fysbHKJGqJm3Fq6KmtqlRJf0oczKof48

Over the next week or two a wiki article for our Grafana will appear
and any references to Cacti on our web sites and docs will start to
disappear, except for a pointer to historical Cacti graphs. Update
of Cacti graphs is going to be disabled very soon.

Feedback on the service is still welcome of course, though the
general approach is by now pretty much decided.

Cheers,
Andy

¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/cacti/

² Available as your usual kind of single Go binary from here:

https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter

but also available in modern Debian (at least) as a package.

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