Cerberus

A monitoring system built with Go v1.26.

OpenAPI Specification

The OpenAPI specification is located under openapi

Development

Spin up containers

make docker/up

Run REST API

make go/rest/run

Run migrations

make db/migrate/up

Destroy containers

make docker/down

Kubernetes Deployment (Minikube)

Prerequisites

• minikube
• Helm
• kubectl

Setup

Start minikube and create the cerberus namespace:

make k8s/setup

Build Images

Build the application and migration Docker images inside minikube's Docker daemon:

make k8s/build

Deploy

Deploy all services (PostgreSQL, Vault, Tempo, Grafana, App) via Helm:

make k8s/deploy

Check Status

make k8s/status

Access Services

Use minikube service to access NodePort services:

minikube service cerberus-app -n cerberus
minikube service cerberus-grafana -n cerberus

Teardown

make k8s/undeploy

Helm Charts

Each service has its own Helm chart under .kubernetes/:

Chart	Service	Ports
postgres/	PostgreSQL 17.5	5432
vault/	Hashicorp Vault 1.21	8200
tempo/	Grafana Tempo	3200, 4317, 4318
grafana/	Grafana 11.6.0	3000
app/	Cerberus REST API	4000, 4010

All services run in the cerberus namespace

Observability

Cerberus ships with a full OpenTelemetry stack: the application exports traces and metrics to an OTel Collector, which fans them out to Tempo (traces) and Prometheus (metrics). Grafana provides a unified UI over both.

Stack overview

Component	Role	Local port
OTel Collector	Receives OTLP from the app, routes to backends	4317 (gRPC), 4318 (HTTP)
Grafana Tempo	Distributed trace storage & query	3200
Prometheus	Metrics storage & query	9090
Grafana	Dashboards, trace & metric exploration	3000

Start the observability stack

The application must point at the collector. In config.yaml:

collector:
  host: "localhost:4317"
  probability: 1.0        # sample rate — lower in production (e.g. 0.05)
  metricInterval: "30s"

Grafana — http://localhost:3000

Grafana is pre-configured with two datasources (no login required in the default dev setup):

Datasource	UID	What it shows
Prometheus	prometheus	HTTP request rates, durations, cache hit/miss, active requests
Tempo	tempo	Distributed traces, per-request spans

Explore traces

1. Open Explore (compass icon in the left sidebar).
2. Select the Tempo datasource.
3. Use Search to filter by service name (cerberus), HTTP method, status code, or trace duration.
4. Click any trace to open the flame graph and see every span — HTTP server, database queries, cache lookups.

Explore metrics

1. Open Explore and select the Prometheus datasource.
2. Useful metric names to start with:

Metric	Description
cerberus_http_server_request_total	Total HTTP requests (by method, path, status)
cerberus_http_server_request_duration_seconds	Request latency histogram
cerberus_http_server_active_requests	In-flight requests gauge
cerberus_cache_hit_total	In-memory (L1) cache hits
cerberus_cache_miss_total	In-memory (L1) cache misses
cerberus_cache_distributed_hit_total	Redis (L2) cache hits
cerberus_cache_distributed_miss_total	Redis (L2) cache misses
cerberus_cache_size	Current number of entries in the in-memory cache
cerberus_http_client_request_total	Outgoing HTTP requests to downstream services

Example PromQL — HTTP error rate over the last 5 minutes:

sum(rate(cerberus_http_server_request_total{status=~"5.."}[5m]))
/
sum(rate(cerberus_http_server_request_total[5m]))

Example PromQL — p99 request latency:

histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum by (le) (rate(cerberus_http_server_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))
)

Correlating traces and metrics

Grafana links traces to metrics automatically when both datasources are configured. In a Prometheus panel, click a data point and choose View in Tempo to jump directly to traces from that time window.

Prometheus — http://localhost:9090

Use the Prometheus UI to run ad-hoc PromQL queries or check scrape targets:

• Status → Targets — confirms the OTel Collector scrape is UP.
• Graph — run any PromQL expression directly.

Tempo — http://localhost:3200

Tempo exposes an HTTP API for direct trace lookup when needed:

# Fetch a trace by ID
curl http://localhost:3200/api/traces/<trace-id>