Every service or product works in its terrain. The path and usage can stretch them to their limits, measuring the size of their heart. Technically, the heart is the business/service logic that they serve. And if we got to run a marathon then we need to measure the size of the heart in the real sense. The measuring comes in handy for the products and services but they need to be well analysed and presented.

Talking about Monitoring Dashboards to measure the size of the heart of any software is the key to scaling up the feature and experience. For the Jitsi meet, there is a long list of monitoring dashboards readily available for use made by some tech enthusiasts.

In my Community Bonding Period, I had a chance to explore these dashboards and derive the usage and requirements to make a useful analysis. I have tried to gist my observations down in this blog.

Jitsi Meet - Monitoring Dashboard Templates

The dashboards had some of the following features in common which are essential for monitoring:

System Health Metrics

It covers the metrics like CPU usage, Memory usage, Disk usage, etc.
Graphs displaying CPU, memory, and disk usage are fundamental for understanding the overall health and performance of the system.
High CPU or memory usage can indicate the need for hardware upgrades or optimizations in the Jitsi service configuration.
Disk usage graphs help ensure that storage is not a bottleneck, especially important for recording services

Service Monitoring (Jitsi Videobridge, Jicofo, Prosody Status)

Monitoring the status of critical services like Jitsi Videobridge, Jicofo, and Prosody helps ensure that the core components of Jitsi Meet are operational.
Any downtime or performance degradation in these services can directly impact the user experience.

Conference Metrics

It is useful to observe the number of active meetings and participants using the Jitsi Meet.
Graphs showing the number of active conferences and participant counts provide insights into usage patterns. These metrics are crucial for understanding peak usage times and planning for capacity.

Network Metrics

Graphs showing network traffic to and from the Jitsi server are essential for diagnosing network-related issues. These metrics help ensure that there is adequate bandwidth for smooth operation.

Apart from these metrics, some dashboards covered metrics like Latency, Packet Loss, and many more aspects. This helped me understand the components and aspects that are important to be scraped and monitored to enhance the product.

Available in the dashboard, Quality of Service metrics provide a detailed view of call quality. Latency, jitter, and packet loss are critical for assessing the real-time performance of video and audio streams.

Links to Dashboards

Conclusion

The various system metrics which help in monitoring the performance are essential to keep the system in check. Whereas the metrics like QoS, bitrate, latency, etc. are important to be scraped and monitored to check for the new requirements of features. Also, I am looking forward to integrating the scraper into various Jitsi components and monitoring them at the lowest cost possible.

Exploring Grafana Dashboards for Jitsi Meet

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