Monitor Seafile with Prometheus

Seafile provides a standardized interface to expose system operational metrics, enabling integration with Prometheus and Grafana. This allows administrators to real-time monitor Seafile service status, including (but not limited to) I/O queue length and background task latency.

Configuration Steps

To enable metric monitoring for Seafile, follow these steps:

1. Enable Metric Exposure

Edit the Seafile configuration file seahub_settings.py (located in the Seafile configuration directory) and add the following configuration items. If the items already exist, update their values accordingly:

# Enable the metric exposure function (set to True to activate)
ENABLE_METRIC = True

# Authentication username
# Used for HTTP Basic Authentication when accessing Seafile's metric endpoint
METRIC_AUTH_USER = "your_prometheus_username"

# Authentication password corresponding to the above username
METRIC_AUTH_PWD = "your_prometheus_password"

Note

Replace your_prometheus_username and your_prometheus_password with custom credentials (recommend using strong, unique passwords for security).

2. Configure Prometheus

After completing the above Seafile configuration, Prometheus can retrieve Seafile metrics via the /metrics endpoint. Key requirements for such configuration:

• Endpoint: Seafile’s metric data is accessible at http://<seafile-server-ip>:<port>/metrics (replace <seafile-server-ip> and <port> with your Seafile server’s actual IP and port).
• Authentication: Use HTTP Basic Authentication and input the METRIC_AUTH_USER and METRIC_AUTH_PWD configured in Step 1.
• Data Scraping: For tools like Prometheus, configure a scrape job to periodically pull data from the /metrics endpoint (refer to Prometheus documentation for details).

For detailed configuration guides of monitoring tools, refer to the official documentation below:

• Prometheus Official Documentation - Configuration Learn how to set up Prometheus scrape jobs, data storage, and metric query rules.
• Grafana Official Documentation - Prometheus Data Source Learn how to connect Grafana to Prometheus, create visual dashboards, and set up alert rules.

Effect Description

Once the configuration is complete:

1. Prometheus will periodically scrape Seafile metrics from the /metrics endpoint (based on the configured scrape interval).
2. You can create custom visual dashboards in Grafana (e.g., "Seafile Monitoring Dashboard" ) to visualize metrics in real time.
3. Alerts can be set up in Grafana (e.g., trigger an alert when Seafile storage usage exceeds 90%) to proactively monitor system health.