How to create a monitoring infrastructure for your Orleans silos and grains

Orleans dashboard is a configuration based bootstrap provider for Orleans silos. The dashboard provides details on the performance of silos, individual grains and also the details on failures etc.

If you are new to actor systems and orleans, it may be helpful to read the official documentation https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/index.html

How do you use it?

First thing you want to do is install the OrleansDashboard packages via NuGet to the GrainServer project (this is where the gains are implemented)

Register the dashboard bootstrapper into the Orleans system

In the OrleansConfiguration.xml file add the new bootstrapper. You can mention the port number on which the dashboard will be accessible. The default value is 8080.

<OrleansConfiguration style=”color: blue; font-family: “consolas”; font-size: 10.0pt;”>=”urn:orleans”>

  <Globals>

    <SeedNode Address=”localhost” Port=”11111″ />

    <StorageProviders>

      <Provider Type=”Orleans.StorageProviders.SimpleSQLServerStorage.SimpleSQLServerStorage” Name=”SqlStore”

                ConnectionString=”Data Source=.SQLEXPRESS;Database=OrleansStore; Integrated Security=True;”

                UseJsonFormat=”false” />

    </StorageProviders>

    <BootstrapProviders>

      <Provider Type=”InfraAutomation.GrainServer.BootstrapServer” Name=”BootstrapServer” />

      <Provider Type=”OrleansDashboard.Dashboard” Name=”Dashboard” Port=”8081″/>

    </BootstrapProviders>

  </Globals>

….

Start the silo and you can now access the dashboard at the configured port like http://localhost:8081