windows_linux_custom_gameserver_metrics

Windows/Linux custom game server metrics

Introduction

Telegraf is a plugin-driven server agent for collecting and reporting metrics. It supports a wide variety of inputs, processors, aggregators, and outputs.

What it does

This script uses telegraf agent that sets up an HTTP server to listen for external metrics. Using this solution, you can send any kind of metrics from your game server to telegraf and you can use any of the telegraf output plugins to store them, in the backend of your choice.

The documentation for the http listener telegraf input plugin is here, check it out for instructions on how to properly configure it. You can also check this telegraf.conf sample config file file for an example of how to configure telegraf to listen for metrics on port 8080.

To send custom metrics, you need send a POST request to the telegraf server from your game server. To do that, you need to find the host VM IP address. This is different depending on the type of Build you are using.

Host IP using Windows or Linux Processes

If you are using process mode, you can talk to telegraf using localhost or 127.0.0.1.

Host IP using Windows Containers

PlayFab configures a bridge network between containers and the host VM. To get the IP of the host when using Windows Containers, you can use the following Powershell script from inside the container, before you start your game server:

$gateway = (Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_IP4RouteTable | where { $_.destination -eq '0.0.0.0' -and $_.mask -eq '0.0.0.0' } | sort metric1 | select nexthop).nexthop
Write-Output $gateway

Host IP using Linux Containers

PlayFab configures a bridge network between containers and the host VM. To get the IP of the host when using Linux Containers, you can run a script from inside the container, before you start your game server. The script you can run depends on the OS that you configure your container image with. For example, if you are using Ubuntu, you can do sudo apt update && sudo apt install net-tools to install netstat and then grab the host VM (which acts as a gateway) IP using:

netstat -rn | grep '^0.0.0.0' | awk '{print $2}'

Sending metrics to telegraf

To send metrics to telegraf, you'd need to send the data in a specific format. You can see the documentation here and a couple of samples below:

curl -i -XPOST 'http://localhost:8080/telegraf' --data-binary 'cpu_load_short,host=server01,region=us-west value=0.64 1434055562000000000'

$headers = @{
    "Content-Type" = "application/octet-stream"
}
$body = "cpu_load_short,host=server01,region=us-west value=0.64 1434055562000000000"
$response = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://localhost:8080/telegraf" -Method POST -Headers $headers -Body $body

Usage

You should download telegraf from the GitHub releases section. The Windows amd64 package works with this sample.

Then, create a zip file with the following contents:

• telegraf.conf
• telegraf package file (e.g. telegraf.exe)
• PF_StartupScript.ps1 or PF_StartupScript.sh file (depending on the OS you are using)

You can now create a new MPS Build with your startup script using the instructions here.