This plugin introduces server monitoring for your NodeBB forum via Prometheus. Prometheus is a leading open-source monitoring solution that I personally use for all my servers. I wanted to have some of the information in NodeBB in my Prometheus monitoring environment. Thus being able to compare user activity with server load, memory usage, NodeJS event loop lag, 503 errors, etc. This plugin makes this possible.

You then can create nice looking graphs to get a nice overview of the data for example with Grafana. Here an example on how this might look. This is my server for the last 48 hours.

As you can see in the lower left corner, I also have some data about captchas. This is done via two hooks provided by this plugin and thus makes it possible for other plugins to provide monitoring metrics.

You can find the plugin in your plugin overview in the ACP. It is obviously also available on npmjs.com:

There you can also find all the metrics that are currently collected. If you have any issues or questions please leave a post in this topic or open an issue on the official repository over at GitLab:

An example dashboard for Grafana can be found here: https://grafana.com/dashboards/6578

After having been called forum of the week on the 23rd May, I might announce it here now as well.

We are quite an old German speaking C++ community on the internet. It goes back to the 1997/98. The previous forum was opened in 2001 and was a phpBB2. We expanded and maintained that phpBB2 ourselves for 17 years until I finally had enough of the horrible code and design of 2001. I wrote my own plugin and migrated with a modified NodeBB. We took over post IDs and topic IDs, converted all BBCode (including our custom extensions) over to Markdown and thus took all the data with us. This means about 2.25 millions posts distributed over about 280,000 topics with nearly 35,000 users. The migrations plugin took 15-16 hours to convert all this data.

So far quite happy with the new forum. It opens up a lot of new possibilities for us. Also helps with search indexes since it is now mobile friendly. Also it is now mobile friendly . I think the majority of the community is also happy with the modernization and new users to the site will probably be more familiar with such a modern design and with Markdown.

We are still missing some stuff from the previous forum and have some open wishes for additional features or improvements. But I will work on this stuff and hopefully share it via core contributions or plugins with the community of NodeBB.

Two main reasons this happened for me:

• url in your config is not configured properly. Thus you try to access your website over another URL than the one configured. If you've installed in a subfolder, make sure to access it at the subfolder location and add the subfolder to the url in the config.
• Your reverse proxy is not configured properly for web sockets. Follow the appropriate documentation.

Just remove the rights to create topics in there from all users. You can still allow to create topics in the sub categories.

Definitely were the cookies. Digged in the code and found the problem in src/middleware/index.js. Created a pull request that fixes this problem:
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/pull/4663

I know there is the nodebb-plugin-superusers but it is heavily outdated and I didn't like the name of it. I only want to give my moderators the possibility to ban users that doesn't make them some type of super users

You can find the plugin here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/nodebb-plugin-ban-privileges

If you have issues feel free to report them at the repository or in this topic.

For the future I might want to also give a group the possibility to ban IP addresses. But I probably first will make a feature request to NodeBB to have temporary IP bans with comments. Basically similar to user bans.

You'll have to ask the author of the plugin. Best is you open an issue on the GitHub repository and hope you'll get an answer: https://github.com/NicolasSiver/nodebb-plugin-ns-spoiler/issues

@baris @Ben-Lubar @julian Found the problem. The solution Ben describes works, but it is painfully slow. And also made no sense. So I continued searching and found it.

It is not a problem in NodeBB. It seems to be a problem in the mongodb package. Downgrading it to version 3.0.4 and then only executing ./nodebb upgrade -s so that the mongodb package isn't upgraded back to 3.0.8 makes the migration work. And it makes it work really fast. It took like 5 minutes.

Found it via this issue in mongoose: https://github.com/Automattic/mongoose/issues/6504
And the issue going along in JIRA: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/NODE-1482

If someone has an account in this JIRA tracker, we perhaps should report there, that we are able to reproduce that bug.

simllll created this issue in Automattic/mongoose

closed Cursor not found - while iterating over sharded collection #6504

@Per0x You could have just deactivated the plugin and everything would have worked perfectly again. You can do this from the command line via ./nodebb reset -p nodebb-plugin-prometheus. See also the NodeBB documentation.

Error is only related to forums with a Redis DB, since they store all values as text. Thanks for the log it is very useful to get that information. I'll go over the code to fix those issue and probably will release a new version in the next days.

I don't but I can't evade all the cheering around me. But will be out soonish anyway and it will die down from then. Its a wonder they made it through the group phase. Just don't tell anyone of my fellow citizens they might burn me alive.

Also be aware that it can take some time for nbbpm to take the changes up. I can't remember exactly how long it can take but it is for sure not instantaneous.

@jtsimoes Yes, you could call it an e-mail blacklist.

I'm searching for a possibility to ban the registration with a specific e-mail address or even better would be to ban specific patterns of e-mail addresses. Is this possible with NodeBB? I'm unable to find anything. If not are there any known plugins that can achieve this? So far I wasn't able to find anything.

Thank you in advance!

@baris said in Is there a simple way to analyze long running queries?:

You can temporarily disable all cron jobs and see if the issue goes away, then we can pinpoint which one causes it. If it is still happening then it's not the cronjobs.

Do you mean in code? Or is there actually a setting to disable them all?

@baris One nodebb process is running.

@julian So far I haven't noticed it outside of production. But my development machine is quite different. Also I usually don't have Prometheus attached to my development environment so it might be possible I don't even notice it. I'll have to look into setting up a second environment without any load but otherwise similar to the production environment. Might take me some time

@baris Yes, they are. But further analysis seems to reveal, that is happening much more often and is building up in spikes before it drops again. This is the measurements for an hour:

Those spikes building up are about 1.5 - 2 minutes apart. I missed them previously as I wasn't zoomed in enough. The measurement is done every 15 seconds. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the change to NodeBB 1.11.x since I hadn't such problems in NodeBB 1.10.x. But I still have absolutely no clue what it is and a very hard time to find possibilities to analyse this better.

I found something new today. First it seems to have gotten quite bad at times. Lag spikes of up to a seconds. The second interesting thing is, that it happens on a schedule. It happens every 25 minutes. Is there anything in NodeBB that is happening every 25 minutes?

@baris said in Is there a simple way to analyze long running queries?:

If you are running mongod, you can try running db.currentOp() to see the running queries during the 503.

Oh, sorry. I might have formulated this a bit misleading. I was more thinking of the HTTP request. Basically find out long running NodeBB requests. I'd like to find out what causes the spike. A long running DB query shouldn't cause a spike as this is IO and shouldn't hurt the NodeJS event loop lag? If there is additional lag there has to be a longer running calculation in NodeBB. Or am I wrong with this assumption?

In NodeBB 1.10.2 I had many 503er and thus decided to just increase the event loop lag threshold to 200ms and also set the check interval to 1000ms. This made most 503er disappear. After upgrading to NodeBB 1.11.2 now suddenly again there is a 503er every 1-5 seconds.

CPU load is not an issue. Memory is also enough available. But I notice that the NodeBB and NodeJS event loop lag at times spikes. And I would like to find out why that is or which queries created those spikes. Is there a possibility to get this information from NodeBB? Are there suitable hooks that could be used for such monitoring?

As far as I'm aware this completely depends on the search plugin you're using.