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Getting Started

This guide walks you through setting up PowerScale Data Insights from scratch: creating a OneFS user, configuring the collectors, setting up InfluxDB and Grafana, and seeing your first dashboards.

Prerequisites

  • A Dell PowerScale cluster running OneFS 9.x or later
  • Network access from the machine running the collectors to the cluster's PAPI port (TCP 8080 by default)
  • InfluxDB v1.8+ or v2.x
  • Grafana 10+

Step 1: Create a OneFS User

Create a dedicated user on your OneFS cluster with the minimum required privileges. See OneFS Setup for detailed instructions.

At minimum, the user needs:

Privilege Required by Purpose
ISI_PRIV_STATISTICS gostats Read cluster statistics
ISI_PRIV_PERFORMANCE goppstats Read Partitioned Performance data
ISI_PRIV_NFS (read-only) goppstats (optional) Resolve NFS export IDs to paths

Step 2: Set Up InfluxDB

InfluxDB v1

# Create the database
influx -execute "CREATE DATABASE isi_data_insights"

InfluxDB v2

Create a bucket named isi_data_insights and generate an API token with write access. InfluxQL compatibility must be enabled (it is by default in InfluxDB v2).

Step 3: Install the Collectors

Option A: Docker Compose (recommended for evaluation)

This brings up InfluxDB, Grafana, and both collectors in one step.

cd docker/
cp gostats.example.toml gostats.toml
cp goppstats.example.toml goppstats.toml

Edit both config files — at minimum, update the [[cluster]] section:

[[cluster]]
hostname = "your-cluster.example.com"
username = "statsuser"
password = "your-password"
verify-ssl = false

Then start the stack:

docker compose up -d

Skip to Step 5 — InfluxDB and Grafana are pre-configured.

Option B: Build from source

Requires Go 1.25+.

git clone https://github.com/Isilon/powerscale_data_insights.git
cd powerscale_data_insights
make build

This produces bin/gostats, bin/goppstats, and bin/dashgen.

Option C: Download pre-built binaries

Download the latest release from the GitHub Releases page for your platform.

Step 4: Configure and Run

Copy the example configs and edit them:

cp configs/gostats.example.toml idic.toml
cp configs/goppstats.example.toml goppstats.toml

In each file, update:

  1. [[cluster]] — your cluster hostname, username, and password
  2. [influxdb] — your InfluxDB host (default localhost:8086)

See Configuration Reference for all options.

Start the collectors:

# Collect cluster statistics
./bin/gostats -config-file idic.toml

# Collect Partitioned Performance data (in a separate terminal)
./bin/goppstats -config-file goppstats.toml

You should see log output indicating successful connection to each cluster and stats being written to InfluxDB.

Step 5: View Dashboards

If using Docker Compose

Open http://localhost:3000 and log in with admin / admin. The dashboards are already provisioned under the PowerScale folder.

If running standalone

  1. Open Grafana and add an InfluxDB datasource:

    • URL: http://localhost:8086
    • Database: isi_data_insights

  2. Import the dashboards from dashboards/influxdb/:

    • Go to Dashboards > Import
    • Upload each JSON file or paste its contents
    • Select your InfluxDB datasource when prompted

The four core dashboards are:

Dashboard Description
PowerScale - Cluster List Multi-cluster overview with health, CPU, capacity, protocol stats
PowerScale - Cluster Detail Single cluster deep dive with CPU, network, disk, cache, protocol panels
PowerScale - Cluster Capacity Storage utilization across clusters
PowerScale - Protocol Overview Cluster-level protocol performance for a single cluster

Step 6: Generate PP Dashboards (Optional)

If you have Partitioned Performance datasets configured on your cluster, use dashgen to generate dashboards for them:

# List datasets (check the PAPI directly or use the OneFS UI)
# Then generate a dashboard for a specific dataset ID:
./bin/dashgen \
  -host your-cluster.example.com \
  -user statsuser \
  -password your-password \
  -dataset 1 \
  -out pp-dataset-1.json

Import the generated JSON file into Grafana. See Dashboards for more details on dashgen usage.

Next Steps