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Monitoring Kubernetes clusters

Reviewed on 20 June 2024 • Published on 14 October 2020
Important

Kubernetes Kapsule is fully integrated with Scaleway’s Observability Cockpit. You can monitor your cluster directly from the cluster’s dashboard, eliminating the need to set up your own monitoring solution. The following content is provided for informational purposes only.

Before you start

To complete the actions presented below, you must have:

  • A Scaleway account logged into the console
  • Owner status or IAM permissions allowing you to perform actions in the intended Organization
  • Created a Kubernetes Kapsule cluster
  • Installed and configured kubectl, the command line interface for Kubernetes, on your local machine
  • Installed helm, the Kubernetes package manager, on your local machine (version 3.2+)

Deploying Prometheus

Deploy the Prometheus stack in a dedicated Kubernetes namespace called monitoring. Set the retention time for 30 days and create a persistent volume (based on Scaleway Block Storage) to store the Prometheus data.

  1. Ensure you are connected to your cluster and kubectl and helm are installed on your local machine.

  2. Add the Prometheus Community Helm repo and the stable Kubernetes repo and update them:

    helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
    helm repo add stable https://kubernetes-charts.storage.googleapis.com/
    helm repo update

  3. Use the helm package manager to install the stable release of Prometheus. Set the following parameters to helm for both of these:

    • server.persistentVolume: 100Gi
    • server.retention: 30d
    helm install prometheus prometheus-community/prometheus --create-namespace --namespace monitoring  --set server.persistentVolume.size=100Gi,server.retention=30d
    NAME:   prometheus
    LAST DEPLOYED: Fri Oct  9 16:35:50 2020
    NAMESPACE: monitoring
    STATUS: DEPLOYED
    [..]

  4. Verify that the created pods are all running once the stack is deployed. You can also check whether the 100Gi block volume was created:

    kubectl get pods,pv,pvc -n monitoring
    NAME                                                READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
    pod/prometheus-alertmanager-6565668c85-5vdxc        2/2     Running   0          67s
    pod/prometheus-kube-state-metrics-6756bbbb8-6qs9r   1/1     Running   0          67s
    pod/prometheus-node-exporter-fbg6s                  1/1     Running   0          67s
    pod/prometheus-pushgateway-6d75c59b7b-6knfd         1/1     Running   0          67s
    pod/prometheus-server-556dbfdfb5-rx6nl              1/2     Running   0          67s
    NAME                                                        CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   RECLAIM POLICY   STATUS   CLAIM                                STORAGECLASS   REASON   AGE
    persistentvolume/pvc-5a9def3b-22a1-4545-9adb-72823b899c36   100Gi      RWO            Delete           Bound    monitoring/prometheus-server         scw-bssd                67s
    persistentvolume/pvc-c5e24d9b-3a69-46c1-9120-b16b7adf73e9   2Gi        RWO            Delete           Bound    monitoring/prometheus-alertmanager   scw-bssd                67s
    NAME                                            STATUS   VOLUME                                     CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   STORAGECLASS   AGE
    persistentvolumeclaim/prometheus-alertmanager   Bound    pvc-c5e24d9b-3a69-46c1-9120-b16b7adf73e9   2Gi        RWO            scw-bssd       68s
    persistentvolumeclaim/prometheus-server         Bound    pvc-5a9def3b-22a1-4545-9adb-72823b899c36   100Gi      RWO            scw-bssd       68s

  5. To access Prometheus use the Kubernetes port forwarding feature:

    export POD_NAME=$(kubectl get pods --namespace monitoring -l "app=prometheus,component=server" -o jsonpath="{.items[0].metadata.name}")
    kubectl --namespace monitoring port-forward $POD_NAME 9090

  6. Access the Prometheus dashboard using the following URL: http://localhost:9090

  7. Verify that both node-exporter and kube-state-metrics metrics are correctly scrapped by Prometheus:

    • The node-exporter metrics begin with “node_”
    • The kube-state-metrics begin with “kube_”

  8. Prometheus is capable of generating graphs on its own. You can test the feature by choosing metrics to analyze directly in the application:

Deploying Grafana

Deploy Grafana to display the Prometheus metrics in some pre-defined dashboards. Deploy it in the monitoring namespace and enable the persistence:

  • persistence.enable : true
  • persistence.type : pvc
  • persistence.size : 10Gi

  1. Run the following command to add the Helm repository and install Grafana using helm:

    helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
    helm install grafana grafana/grafana \
                                  --set persistence.enabled=true,persistence.type=pvc,persistence.size=10Gi \
                                  --namespace=monitoring

  2. Retrieve the admin password once Grafana is installed:

    kubectl get secret --namespace monitoring grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo

  3. Configure the port forwarding to access the Grafana web interface at this address: http://localhost:3000

    kubectl port-forward --namespace monitoring service/grafana 3000:80
    Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:3000 -> 3000
    Forwarding from [::1]:3000 -> 3000

  4. Open the Grafana Web Interface in a web browser at: http://localhost:3000. The login screen displays. Enter the user admin and the password recovered in step 2:

    The welcome screen displays and invites you to complete the configuration of Grafana.

  5. Click Add data source to configure a new data source:

  6. Choose Prometheus as data source from the list of available options.

  7. Enter the details of the data source. You can leave the default settings and add the data source: http://prometheus-server. Click Test & Save to validate the connection to Prometheus and to save the settings:

  8. Click + and then Import to import a ready-to-use dashboard from the Grafana website. To create a dashboard that uses kube-state-metrics, import the dashboard number 8588 and get information about your Deployment, StatefulSet and DaemonSet:

  9. Choose Prometheus as data source and click Import.

  10. Access the dashboard with metrics for Deployement, StatefulSet and DaemonSet:

  11. You can also configure additional dashboards, for example, the node exporter full dashboard (1860) to display a dashboard with system metrics for each Kubernetes node:

Deploying Loki

Loki is a log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.

The loki application is not included in the default Helm repositories.

Important

Since December 2020, Loki’s Helm charts were moved from their initial location within the Loki repo to their new location at https://github.com/grafana/helm-charts which is hosted in https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts.

  1. Add the Grafana repository to Helm and update it.

    helm repo add grafana https://grafana.github.io/helm-charts
    helm repo update

    Which returns

    "grafana" has been added to your repositories
    Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
    ...Successfully got an update from the "loki" chart repository
    ...Successfully got an update from the "grafana" chart repository
    Update Complete. ⎈Happy Helming!⎈

  2. Install the loki-stack with Helm. Install all the stack in a Kubernetes dedicated namespace named loki-stack. Deploy it to your cluster and enable persistence (allow Helm to create a Scaleway block device and attach it to the Loki pod to store its data) using a Kubernetes Persistent Volumes to survive a pod re-schedule:

    helm install loki-stack grafana/loki-stack \
                                    --create-namespace \
                                    --namespace loki-stack \
                                    --set promtail.enabled=true,loki.persistence.enabled=true,loki.persistence.size=100Gi

    It will use Kapsule’s default storage class, scw-bsdd, to create block volumes using Scaleway Block Storage. If you plan to use Loki on a production system, ensure that you set up a retention period to avoid filling the file systems. For instance, use these parameters if you want to enable a 30-day retention (logs older than 30 days will be deleted). Note that you have to choose the size of the persistent volume to fit the amount of volume your deployment will create.

    • config.table_manager.retention_deletes_enabled : true
    • config.table_manager.retention_period: 720h

  3. Install Grafana in the loki-stack namespace with Helm. To allow Grafana to survive a re-schedule, enable persistence too:

    • persistence.enabled: true
    • persistence.type: pvc
    • persistence.size: 10Gi
    helm install loki-grafana grafana/grafana \
                                  --set persistence.enabled=true,persistence.type=pvc,persistence.size=10Gi \
                                  --namespace=loki-stack

  4. Check if the block devices were correctly created by Kubernetes:

    kubectl get pv,pvc -n loki-stack
    NAME                                                        CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   RECLAIM POLICY   STATUS   CLAIM                             STORAGECLASS   REASON   AGE
    persistentvolume/pvc-88038939-24a5-4383-abe8-f3aab97b7ce7   10Gi       RWO            Delete           Bound    loki-stack/loki-grafana           scw-bssd                18s
    persistentvolume/pvc-c6fce993-a73d-4423-9464-7c10ab009062   100Gi      RWO            Delete           Bound    loki-stack/storage-loki-stack-0   scw-bssd                4m30s
    NAME                                         STATUS   VOLUME                                     CAPACITY   ACCESS MODES   STORAGECLASS   AGE
    persistentvolumeclaim/loki-grafana           Bound    pvc-88038939-24a5-4383-abe8-f3aab97b7ce7   10Gi       RWO            scw-bssd       19s
    persistentvolumeclaim/storage-loki-stack-0   Bound    pvc-c6fce993-a73d-4423-9464-7c10ab009062   100Gi      RWO            scw-bssd       5m3s

  5. Now that both Loki and Grafana are installed in the cluster, check if the pods are correctly running:

    kubectl get pods -n loki-stack
    NAME                            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
    loki-grafana-67994589cc-7jq4t   0/1     Running   0          74s
    loki-stack-0                    1/1     Running   0          5m58s
    loki-stack-promtail-dtf5v       1/1     Running   0          5m42s

  6. To be able to connect to Grafana get the admin password:

    kubectl get secret --namespace loki-stack loki-grafana -o jsonpath="{.data.admin-password}" | base64 --decode ; echo

  7. Configure a port-forward to reach Grafana from your web browser:

    kubectl port-forward --namespace loki-stack service/loki-grafana 3000:80
    Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:3000 -> 3000
    Forwarding from [::1]:3000 -> 3000

  8. Access http://localhost:3000 to reach the Grafana interface. Log in using the admin user and the password you got above.

  9. Add the Loki source to Grafana (http://loki-stack.loki-stack:3100).

  10. Check you can access your logs using the explore tab in Grafana:

You now have a Loki stack up and running. All your pods’ logs will be stored in Loki and you will be able to view and query your applications’ logs in Grafana. Refer to the Loki documentation, if you want to learn more about querying the Loki data source.

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