INFRA Node Model

The INFRA module plays a special role in Pigsty: it’s not a traditional “cluster” but rather a management hub composed of a group of infrastructure nodes, providing core services for the entire Pigsty deployment. Each INFRA node is an autonomous infrastructure service unit running core components like Nginx, Grafana, and VictoriaMetrics, collectively providing observability and management capabilities for managed database clusters.

There are two core entities in Pigsty’s INFRA module:

• Node: A server running infrastructure components—can be bare metal, VM, container, or Pod.
• Component: Various infrastructure services running on nodes, such as Nginx, Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, etc.

INFRA nodes typically serve as Admin Nodes, the control plane of Pigsty.

Component Composition

Each INFRA node runs the following core components:

These components together form Pigsty’s observability infrastructure.

Examples

Let’s look at a concrete example with a two-node INFRA deployment:

infra:
  hosts:
    10.10.10.10: { infra_seq: 1 }
    10.10.10.11: { infra_seq: 2 }

The above config fragment defines a two-node INFRA deployment:

For production environments, deploying at least two INFRA nodes is recommended for infrastructure component redundancy.

Identity Parameters

Pigsty uses the INFRA_ID parameter group to assign deterministic identities to each INFRA module entity. One parameter is required:

With node sequence assigned at node level, Pigsty automatically generates unique identifiers for each entity based on rules:

The INFRA module assigns infra-N format identifiers to nodes for distinguishing multiple infrastructure nodes in the monitoring system. However, this doesn’t change the node’s hostname or system identity; nodes still use their existing hostname or IP address for identification.

Service Portal

INFRA nodes provide unified web service entry through Nginx. The infra_portal parameter defines services exposed through Nginx:

infra_portal:
  home         : { domain: i.pigsty }
  grafana      : { domain: g.pigsty, endpoint: "${admin_ip}:3000", websocket: true }
  prometheus   : { domain: p.pigsty, endpoint: "${admin_ip}:8428" }   # VMUI
  alertmanager : { domain: a.pigsty, endpoint: "${admin_ip}:9059" }

Users access different domains, and Nginx routes requests to corresponding backend services:

Accessing Pigsty services via domain names is recommended over direct IP + port.

Deployment Scale

The number of INFRA nodes depends on deployment scale and HA requirements:

In singleton deployment, INFRA components share the same node with PGSQL, ETCD, etc. In small-scale deployments, INFRA nodes typically also serve as “Admin Node” / backup admin node and local software repository (/www/pigsty). In larger deployments, these responsibilities can be separated to dedicated nodes.

Monitoring Label System

Pigsty’s monitoring system collects metrics from INFRA components themselves. Unlike database modules, each component in the INFRA module is treated as an independent monitoring object, distinguished by the cls (class) label.

Using a two-node INFRA deployment (infra_seq: 1 and infra_seq: 2) as example, component monitoring labels are:

All INFRA component metrics use a unified job="infra" label, distinguished by the cls label:

nginx_up{cls="nginx", ins="nginx-1", ip="10.10.10.10", job="infra"}
grafana_info{cls="grafana", ins="grafana-1", ip="10.10.10.10", job="infra"}
vm_app_version{cls="vmetrics", ins="vmetrics-1", ip="10.10.10.10", job="infra"}
vlogs_rows_ingested_total{cls="vlogs", ins="vlogs-1", ip="10.10.10.10", job="infra"}
alertmanager_alerts{cls="alertmanager", ins="alertmanager-1", ip="10.10.10.10", job="infra"}