spacetraders-inventory

README

spacetraders-inventory

Space Traders monitoring using Grafana, Prometheus and Golang

Overview

This repository is part of a bigger solution to play Space Traders with a different approach: instead of taking the actions directly, you are the CEO of the company and don't have time for the micromanagement. As expected you are only interested in numbers, charts and cool graphics showing you how much money your company is profiting.

Using "real-world" applications to monitor "real-world" business, we will be able to see how the company is progressing.

Hopefully, in the future, it will be possible to send "management orders" to tweak your business (buy new ships, change routes etc.), but at the moment, just let your employees do their thing.

What this application does

This application is written in Golang, and its sole purpose is to make requests to Space Traders API for information, for example:

• How many ships does the user own?
• How many structures does the user own?
• How much credit does the user own?
• How much space is available in the ship's cargo?

Once this data is collected, it is forwarded to Prometheus, which will be the datasource for Grafana. In Grafana, you will see all those values in nice and shiny charts and tables.

What this application does not do

It is not very interactive: the idea is to provide information, not an interface to interact directly with the Space Traders API. As mentioned before, I hope to provide some interaction with the API later on, but this is not the focus right now.

How to run this application

As mentioned, this is part of a bigger application, so this should not be started individually; it will be invoked, compiled, started and monitored together with the other components. For more information, refer to the spacetraders-hq repo.

That being said, you could run this application isolated using the docker-compose template file. Notice that it will start Prometheus, Grafana and Jaeger too. If this is needed or not, and the configuration details, will depend on your needs and environment.

If you have nothing like that already in your environment (no Prometheus, Grafana or Jaeger running), the docker-compose template file contains the defaults values and should work out of the box. So, for a quick-and-dirty test, you can simply rename the file to docker-compose.yml and run the following command:

docker-compose up -d --build

You should find the GUIs in the following URLs:

• Prometheus: http://localhost:9090/graph
• Application exported metrics: http://localhost:9091/metrics
• Grafana: http://localhost:3000
• Jaeger: http://localhost:16686

When you are done playing, just run docker-compose down.

I have no idea what you are talking about

I will try to cover all the important topics and terms here, but if something is still not clear, let me know and I'll try to elaborate on it.

• API: simply put, an API is a set of URLs that you can access to reach an application running somewhere else. In our case, the Space Traders game is running on a server we don't have direct access, so if we want to interact with the game, we can use its API to ask information about ships, trade goods, fly to other planets etc.

• Space Traders: using their own words, it is "a unique multiplayer game built on a free Web API". I just want to clarify that I am not involved directly in the Space Traders game development or with the company behind it. I just find the idea amazing and wanted to build something on top of it. More info at https://spacetraders.io

• Golang (aka Go): a programming language that generates a small, fast application that can be easily run in Docker. I'm using this language to collect all the required information from Space Traders and feed Prometheus.

• Prometheus: a monitoring application, to which you can provide metrics, generate alerts or be the datasource for other applications (e.g., Grafana). In our case, the application built with Golang feeds the data collected from Space Traders game to Prometheus, which will forward that data to Grafana. More info at https://prometheus.com

• Grafana: a solution to create dashboard with data coming from a wide variety of sources. In our case, we are getting data from Prometheus. I have created some dashboards with the data, but feel free to use those as a starting point for your own custom dashboards. More info at https://grafana.com

• Jaeger: an application to monitor and troubleshoot distributed tracing. In other words, the Golang application I created sends to Jaeger tracing information, indicating when specific processes start, when they end, and some details during its execution, in case we want to troubleshoot why a particular step in the execution took longer than expected. More info at https://www.jaegertracing.io