Here is a guide on setting up metrics for the Unreal Engine servers using Prometheus & Grafana.

<aside> 📖 Table of content

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Introduction

Prometheus and **Grafana ****are two popular free and **open-source ****tools, that will help you track the state of the server to promptly prevent a lack of resources and any other potential issues (that will be covered by your metrics). Using these services you can also collect data on how people are playing your game to help game designers make better decisions, or gather statistics to present to investors in a user-friendly way.

• Prometheus is a monitoring & alerting system that collects and stores its metrics as time series data, i.e. metrics information is stored with the timestamp at which it was recorded, alongside optional key-value pairs called labels. Prometheus usually collects metrics by periodically pulling them from target services, but you can use an optional Pushgateway component that allows to push the metrics to your Prometheus server manually.
• Grafana is an excellent system for visualizing and analyzing information, which allows you to work out of the box with a wide range of data sources. In our case presented below it will work with Prometheus using prometheus functional query language - PromQL.

Setup Grafana & Prometheus

<aside> 💡 There are a few examples of how to install these tools. Most likely for real project you will install it on a remote server using docker files or something else. As, for simplicity, there are the necessary steps below to install tools on your local machine using precompiled binaries.

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Setup Prometheus

1. Install Prometheus:

   • Download Prometheus from the official website: https://prometheus.io/download/.
   • Extract the downloaded archive to a directory of your choice.
   • Navigate to the Prometheus directory in the terminal.

2. Configure Prometheus:

   • Create a configuration file named prometheus.yml. You can start with a basic configuration like this:

     global:
       scrape_interval: 15s
     
     scrape_configs:
       - job_name: 'prometheus'
         static_configs:
           - targets: ['localhost:9090']
     

3. Open a terminal and run Prometheus:

   prometheus.exe --config.file=prometheus.yml
   

4. Check localhost:9090/targets. If you did it right you will see something like that (UI may differ depending on a version):

   

Setup Pushgateway component

<aside> ⛔ Note that Pushgateway is an optional component, if you are not interested in the push-based model of interaction with Prometheus, you can skip installing it.

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1. Install Prometheus Pushgateway:
   • Download the Pushgateway binary from the official Prometheus GitHub releases: https://github.com/prometheus/pushgateway/releases.
   • Extract the downloaded archive and navigate to the Pushgateway directory.