How To Install Vector Monitoring on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Vector Monitoring on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, A vector is an open-source on-host performance monitoring framework that exposes hand-chosen high-resolution program and program metrics to every engineer’s browser. Possessing the correct metrics available on-demand and in a top resolution is key to knowing how a system behaves and correctly troubleshooting performance problems.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation Vector Monitoring framework on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Vector Monitoring on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Performance Co-Pilot (PCP).

Before installing Vector you will first have to install Performance Co-Pilot (PCP). It’s an open-source toolkit designed for monitoring and managing system-level performance:

echo "deb https://dl.bintray.com/netflixoss/ubuntu {codename} main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Install PCP using the following command:

apt-get update
apt-get install pcp pcp-webapi

Once installed, restart PCP daemons and setup start on boot:

systemctl enable pmcd.service
systemctl enable pmwebd.service
systemctl enable pmlogger.service

Step 3. Installing Vector Monitoring Framework

First, download the Vector archive from the Netflix OSS repository, at the time of this writing the latest version of Vector is 1.0.3:

wget https://bintray.com/artifact/download/netflixoss/downloads/1.0.3/vector.tar.gz

Create a directory to extract vector, we need to create this since vector build is not placed in a directory:

mdkir vector
tar xzf vector.tar.gz -C vector

Step 4. Accessing Vector Monitoring.

Vector Monitoring Framework will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/vector or http://server-ip/vector and complete the required steps to finish the installation.

Enter the hostname or IP address of the server that you want to monitor. If you change pmwebd port you need to specify hostname:port or IP address:port. The performance graphs will start showing the current condition of your system.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Vector. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Vector Monitoring framework on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS  (Xenial Xerus) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Vector Monitoring website.