GCP Alerting Policy for failed GKE CronJob - kubernetes

What would be the best way to set up a GCP monitoring alert policy for a Kubernetes CronJob failing? I haven't been able to find any good examples out there.
Right now, I have an OK solution based on monitoring logs in the Pod with ERROR severity. I've found this to be quite flaky, however. Sometimes a job will fail for some ephemeral reason outside my control (e.g., an external server returning a temporary 500) and on the next retry, the job runs successfully.
What I really need is an alert that is only triggered when a CronJob is in a persistent failed state. That is, Kubernetes has tried rerunning the whole thing, multiple times, and it's still failing. Ideally, it could also handle situations where the Pod wasn't able to come up either (e.g., downloading the image failed).
Any ideas here?
Thanks.

First of all, confirm the GKE’s version that you are running. For that, the following commands are going to help you to identify the GKE’s
default version and the available versions too:
Default version.
gcloud container get-server-config --flatten="channels" --filter="channels.channel=RAPID" \
--format="yaml(channels.channel,channels.defaultVersion)"
Available versions.
gcloud container get-server-config --flatten="channels" --filter="channels.channel=RAPID" \
--format="yaml(channels.channel,channels.validVersions)"
Now that you know your GKE’s version and based on what you want is an alert that is only triggered when a CronJob is in a persistent failed state, GKE Workload Metrics was the GCP’s solution that used to provide a fully managed and highly configurable solution for sending to Cloud Monitoring all Prometheus-compatible metrics emitted by GKE workloads (such as a CronJob or a Deployment for an application). But, as it is right now deprecated in G​K​E 1.24 and was replaced with Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, then this last is the best option you’ve got inside of GCP, as it lets you monitor and alert on your workloads, using Prometheus, without having to manually manage and operate Prometheus at scale.
Plus, you have 2 options from the outside of GCP: Prometheus as well and Ranch’s Prometheus Push Gateway.
Finally and just FYI, it can be done manually by querying for the job and then checking it's start time, and compare that to the current time, this way, with bash:
START_TIME=$(kubectl -n=your-namespace get job your-job-name -o json | jq '.status.startTime')
echo $START_TIME
Or, you are able to get the job’s current status as a JSON blob, as follows:
kubectl -n=your-namespace get job your-job-name -o json | jq '.status'
You can see the following thread for more reference too.
Taking the “Failed” state as the medullary point of your requirement, setting up a bash script with kubectl to send an email if you see a job that is in “Failed” state can be useful. Here I will share some examples with you:
while true; do if `kubectl get jobs myjob -o jsonpath='{.status.conditions[?(#.type=="Failed")].status}' | grep True`; then mail email#address -s jobfailed; else sleep 1 ; fi; done
For newer K8s:
while true; do kubectl wait --for=condition=failed job/myjob; mail#address -s jobfailed; done

Related

How to monitor pod preemption event

I have a bunch of Rancher clusters I take care of and on some of them developers use PriorityClasses to ensure that some of the more important workloads get scheduled. The 3 PriorityClasses are in 3 digits range so they will not interfere with the default ones. However, at present none of the PriorityClasses is set as default and neither is the preemptionPolicy set so it defaults to PreemptLowerPriority.
None of the rancher, longhorn, prometheus, grafana, etc., workloads have priorityClassName set.
Long story short, I believe this causes havoc on the cluster when resources are in short supply.
Before I take my opinion to the developers I would like to collect some data to back up my story.
The question: How do I detect if the pod was Terminated due to Preemption?
I tried to google the subject but couldn't find anything. I was hoping kube state metrics would have something but I didn't find anything.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You can try to look for convincing data like the pod termination reason with help of kubectl.
You can see the last restart logs of a container using the following command:
kubectl logs podname -c containername --previous
You can also use the following command to check the lifecycle events sent by the kubelet to the apiserver about the pod.
kubectl describe pod podname
Finally, You can also write a final message to /dev/termination-log, and this will show up as described in the docs.
To use kubectl commands with rancher kindly refer to this documentation page.

Is there any kubectl command to poll until all the pod roll to new code?

I am building deploy pipeline. I Need a "kubectl" command that would tell me that rollout is completed to all the pods then I can deploy to next stage.
The Deployment documentation suggests kubectl rollout status, which among other things will return a non-zero exit code if the deployment isn't complete. kubectl get deployment will print out similar information (how many replicas are expected, available, and up-to-date), and you can add a -w option to watch it.
For this purpose you can also consider using one of the Kubernetes APIs. You can "get" or "watch" the deployment object, and get back something matching the structure of a Deployment object. Using that you can again monitor the replica count, or the embedded condition list, and decide if it's ready or not. If you're using the "watch" API you'll continue to get updates as the object status changes.
The one trick here is detecting failed deployments. Say you're deploying a pod that depends on a database; usual practice is to configure the pod with the hostname you expect the database to have, and just crash (and get restarted) if it's not there yet. You can briefly wind up in CrashLoopBackOff state when this happens. If your application or deployment is totally wrong, of course, you'll also wind up in CrashLoopBackOff state, and your deployment will stop progressing. There's not an easy way to tell these two cases apart; consider an absolute timeout.

Openshift deployment validation - QA

wanted to know if there's any tool that can validate an openshift deployment. Let's say you have a deploy configuration file with different features (secrets, routes, services, environment variables, etc) and I want to validate after the deployment has finished and the POD/s is/are created in Openshift, that all those things are there as requested on the file. Like a tool for QA.
thanks
Readiness probe are there which can execute http requests on the pod to confirm its availability. Also it can execute commands to confirm desired resources are available within the container.
Readiness probe
There is a particular flag --dry-run in Kubernetes for resource creation which performs basic syntax verification and template object schema validation without real object implementation, therefore you can do the test for all underlying objects defined in the deployment manifest file.
I think it is also feasible to achieve through OpenShift client:
$ oc create -f deployment-app.yaml --dry-run
or
$ oc apply -f deployment-app.yaml --dry-run
You can find some useful OpenShift client commands in Developer CLI Operations documentation page.
For one time validation, you can create a Job (OpenShift) with Init Container (OpenShift) that ensures that all deployment process is done, and then run test/shell script with sequence of kubectl/curl/other commands to ensure that every piece of deployment are in place and in desired state.
For continuous validation, you can create a CronJob (OpenShift) that will periodically create a test Job and report the result somewhere.
This answer can help you to create all that stuff.

Run a container on a pod failure Kubernetes

I have a cronjob that runs and does things regularly. I want to send a slack message with the technosophos/slack-notify container when that cronjob fails.
Is it possible to have a container run when a pod fails?
There is nothing built in for this that i am aware of. You could use a web hook to get notified when a pod changes and look for state stuff in there. But you would have to build the plumbing yourself or look for an existing third party tool.
Pods and Jobs are different things. If you want to wait for a job that has failed and send an email after it has, you can do something like this in bash:
while true
do
kubectl wait --for=condition=failed job/myjob
kubectl run --image=technosophos/slack-notify --env="EMAIL=failure#yourdomain.com"
done
To the question: Is it possible to have a container run when a pod fails?
Yes , although there is nothing out of the box right now , but you can define a health check.
Then you can write a cron job , or a Jenkins job , or a custom kubernetes cluster service/controller that checks/probes that health check regularly and if the health check fails then you can run a container based on that.

kubernetes minikube faster uptime

I am using minikube and building my projects by tearing down the previous project and rebuilding it with
kubectl delete -f myprojectfiles
kubectl apply -f myprojectfiles
The files are a deployment and a service.
When I access my website I get a 503 error as I'm waiting for kubernetes to bring up the deployment. Is there anyway to speed this up? I see that my application is already built because the logs show it is ready. However it stays showing 503 for what feels like a few minute before everything in kubernetes triggers and starts serving me the application.
What are some things I can do to speed up the uptime?
Configure what is called readinessProbe, it won't fasten your boot up time, but it will help you by not giving false sense that application is up and running. With this your traffic will only be sent to your application pod when it is ready to accept the connection. Please read about it here.
FWIW your application might be waiting on some dependency to be up and running, also add these kinda health checks to that dependency pod.
You should not delete your Kubernetes resources. Use either kubectl apply or kubectl replace to update your project.
If you delete it, the nginx ingress controller won't find any upstream for a short period of time and puts on a blacklist for some seconds.
Also you should make sure, that you use Deployment which is able to do a rolling update without any downtime.