Running Node Exporter on Your Synology NAS

Introduction

As part of the new year, I started rebuilding my home lab to retire my aging Mac Mini ESXi cluster with “new” Dell PowerEdge R220 servers. More on the Dell's later; however, this prompted me to change out my monitoring stack to start utilizing Prometheus’ node exporter. Since node exporter is very lightweight, I decided to start capturing telemetry from my Synology DS1517+ network area storage (NAS). I didn't see any documentation so I wrote something up.

Dependencies

You dependencies installed or configured before we get started:

• SSH enabled on your NAS
• A method to SSH into your NAS
• Putty (Windows)
• Terminal (MacOS/Linux)
• Docker installed on your Synology

Getting Started

The following should help you get node exporter running your Synology.

1. SSH into you Synology
2. Elevate your privileges to root sudo su
3. Create and edit a new docker compose file vi docker-compose.yml
4. Press i and paste in this docker compose template
5. Press esc, then :, followed by wq and press enter save the template
6. Now it is time to run your new container on your NAS by running the following command: docker-compose up
7. Navigate to http://youripaddress:9100/metrics to see node-exporter's metrics

Feel free to provide feedback down below, but I hope that helps and good luck!