# Metrics

Cortex includes Prometheus for metrics collection and Grafana for visualization. You can monitor your APIs with the default Grafana dashboards, or create custom metrics and dashboards.

## Accessing the dashboard

The dashboard URL is displayed once you run a `cortex get <api_name>` command.

Alternatively, you can access it on `http://<operator_url>/dashboard`. Run the following command to get the operator URL:

```bash
cortex env list
```

If your operator load balancer is configured to be internal, there are a few options for accessing the dashboard:

1. Access the dashboard from a machine that has VPC Peering configured to your cluster's VPC, or which is inside of your

   cluster's VPC.
2. Run `kubectl port-forward -n default grafana-0 3000:3000` to forward Grafana's port to your local machine, and access

   the dashboard on <http://localhost:3000> (see instructions for setting up `kubectl` [here](https://docs.cortexlabs.com/0.36/clusters/advanced/kubectl)).
3. Set up VPN access to your cluster's

   VPC ([docs](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpn-connections.html)).

### Default credentials

The dashboard is protected with username / password authentication, which by default are:

* Username: admin
* Password: admin

You will be prompted to change the admin user password in the first time you log in.

Grafana allows managing the access of several users and managing teams. For more information on this topic check the [grafana documentation](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/manage-users).

### Selecting an API

You can select one or more APIs to visualize in the top left corner of the dashboard.

![](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7456627/107375721-57545180-6ae9-11eb-9474-ba58ad7eb0c5.png)

### Selecting a time range

Grafana allows you to select a time range on which the metrics will be visualized. You can do so in the top right corner of the dashboard.

![](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7456627/107376148-d9dd1100-6ae9-11eb-8c2b-c678b41ade01.png)

**Note: Cortex only retains a maximum of 2 weeks worth of data at any moment in time**

### Available dashboards

There are more than one dashboard available by default. You can view the available dashboards by accessing the Grafana menu: `Dashboards -> Manage -> Cortex folder`.

The dashboards that Cortex ships with are the following:

* RealtimeAPI
* BatchAPI
* Cluster resources
* Node resources

## Exposed metrics

Cortex exposes more metrics with Prometheus, that can be potentially useful. To check the available metrics, access the `Explore` menu in grafana and press the `Metrics` button.

![](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7456627/107377492-515f7000-6aeb-11eb-9b46-909120335060.png)

You can use any of these metrics to set up your own dashboards.