Live monitoring of container, nodes and cluster - kubernetes

we are using k8s cluster for one of our application, cluster is owned by other team and we dont have full control over thereā€¦ We are trying to find out metrics around resource utilization (CPU and memory), detail about running containers/pods/nodes etc. Need to find out how many parallel containers are running. Problem is they have exposed monitoring of cluster via Prometheus but with Prometheus we are not getting live data, it does not have info about running containers.
My query is , what is that API which is by default available in k8s cluster and can give all what we need. We dont want to read data form another client like Prometheus or anything else, we want to read metrics directly from cluster so that data is not stale. Any suggestions?

As you mentioned you will need metrics-server (or heapster) to get those information.
You can confirm if your metrics server is running kubectl top nodes/pods or just by checking if there is a heapster or metrics-server pod present in kube-system namespace.
Also the provided command would be able to show you the information you are looking for. I wont go into details as here you can find a lot of clues and ways of looking at cluster resource usage. You should probably take a look at cadvisor too which should be already present in the cluster. It exposes a web UI which exports live information about all the containers on the machine.
Other than that there are probably commercial ways of acheiving what you are looking for, for example SignalFx and other similar projects - but this will probably require the cluster administrator involvement.

Related

Monitoring inside Pods with Prometheus

I want to know if it's possible to get metrics for the services inside the pods using Prometheus.
I don't mean monitoring the pods but the processes inside those pods. For example, containers which have apache or nginx running inside them along other main services, so I can retrieve metrics for the web server and the other main service (for example a wordpress image which aso comes with an apache configured).
The cluster already has running kube-state-metrics, node-exporter and blackbox exporter.
Is it possible? If so, how can I manage to do it?
Thanks in advance
Prometheus works by scraping an HTTP endpoint that provides the actual metrics. That's where you get the term "exporter". So if you want to get metrics from the processes running inside of pods you have three primary steps:
You must modify those processes to export the metrics you care about. This is inherently something that must be custom for each kind of application. The good news is that there are lots of pre-built ones including things like nginx and apache that you mention . Most application frameworks also have capability to export prometheus metrics. ex: Microprofile, Quarkus, and many more.
You must then modify your pod definition to expose the HTTP endpoint that those processes are now providing. Very straightfoward, but will depend on the configuration you specify for your exporters.
You must then modify your Prometheus to scrape those targets. This will depend on your monitoring stack. For Openshift you will find the docs here for enabling user workload monitoring, and here for providing exporter details.

Kubernetes Cluster - How to automatically generate documentation/Architecture of services

We started using Kubernetes, a few time ago, and now we have deployed a fair amount of services. It's becoming more and more difficult to know exactly what is deployed. I suppose many people are facing the same issue, so is there already a solution to handle this issue?
I'm talking of a solution that when connected to kubernetes (via kubectl for example) can generate a kind of map off the cluster.
In order to display one or many resources you need to use kubectl get command.
To show details of a specific resource or group of resources you can use kubectl describe command.
Please check the links I provided for more details and examples.
You may also want to use Web UI (Dashboard)
Dashboard is a web-based Kubernetes user interface. You can use
Dashboard to deploy containerized applications to a Kubernetes
cluster, troubleshoot your containerized application, and manage the
cluster resources. You can use Dashboard to get an overview of
applications running on your cluster, as well as for creating or
modifying individual Kubernetes resources (such as Deployments, Jobs,
DaemonSets, etc). For example, you can scale a Deployment, initiate a
rolling update, restart a pod or deploy new applications using a
deploy wizard.
Let me know if that helped.

How can I retrieve the memory utilization of a pod in kubernetes via kubectl?

Inside a namespace, I have created a pod with its specs consisting of memory limit and memory requests parameters. Once up a and running, I would like to know how can I get the memory utilization of the pod in order to figure out if the memory utilization is within the specified limit or not. "kubectl top" command returns back with a services related error.
kubectl top pod <pod-name> -n <fed-name> --containers
FYI, this is on v1.16.2
You need to install metrics server to get the metrics. Follow the below thread
Error from server (NotFound): podmetrics.metrics.k8s.io "mem-example/memory-demo" not found
kubectl top pod POD_NAME --containers
shows metrics for a given pod and its containers.
If you want to see graphs of memory and cpu utilization then you can see them through the kubernetes dashboard.
A better solution would be to install a metrics server alongwith prometheus and grafana in your cluster. Prometheus will scrape the metrics which can be used by grafana for displaying as graphs.
This might be useful.
Instead of building ad-hoc metric snapshots, a much better way is to install and work with 3rd party data collector programs which if managed well gives you a great solution for monitoring systems and a neat Grafana UI (or likewise) you can play with. One of them is Prometheus and which comes highly recommended.
using such PnP systems, you can not only create a robust monitoring pipeline but also the consumption and hence the reaction to the problem is well managed and executed compared to only relying on TOP

Get request count from Kubernetes service

Is there any way to get statistics such as service / endpoint access for services defined in Kubernetes cluster?
I've read about Heapster, but it doesn't seem to provide these statistics. Plus, the whole setup is tremendously complicated and relies on a ton of third-party components. I'd really like something much, much simpler than that.
I've been looking into what may be available in kube-system namespace, and there's a bunch of containers and services, there, Heapster including, but they are effectively inaccessible because they require authentication I cannot provide, and kubectl doesn't seem to have any API to access them (or does it?).
Heapster is the agent that collects data, but then you need a monitoring agent to interpret these data. On GCP, for example, that's fluentd who gets these metrics and sends to Stackdriver.
Prometheus is an excellent monitoring tool. I would recommend this one, if youare not on GCP.
If you would be on GCP, then as mentioned above you have Stackdriver Monitoring, that is configured by default for K8s clusters. All you have to do is to create a Stackdriver accound (this is done by one click from GCP Console), and you are good to go.

How do you monitor kubernetes nodes deployed using kops?

We have some Kubernetes clusters that have been deployed using kops in AWS.
We really like using the upstream/official images.
We have been wondering whether or not there was a good way to monitor the systems without installing software directly on the hosts? Are there docker containers that can extract the information from the host? I think that we are likely concerned with:
Disk space (this seems to be passed through to docker via df
Host CPU utilization
Host memory utilization
Is this host/node level information already available through heapster?
Not really a question about kops, but a question about operating Kubernetes. kops stops at the point of having a functional k8s cluster. You have networking, DNS, and nodes have joined the cluster. From there your world is your oyster.
There are many different options for monitoring with k8s. If you are a small team I usually recommend offloading monitoring and logging to a provider.
If you are a larger team or have more specific needs then you can look at such options as Prometheus and others. Poke around in the https://github.com/kubernetes/charts repository, as I know there is a Prometheus chart there.
As with any deployment of any form of infrastructure you are going to need Logging, Monitoring, and Metrics. Also, do not forget to monitor the monitoring ;)
I am using https://prometheus.io/, it goes naturally with kubernetes.
Kubernetes api already exposes a bunch of metrics in prometheus format,
https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx also exposes prometheus metrics (enable-vts-status: "true"), and you can also install https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter as a daemonset to monitor CPU, disk, etc...
I install one prometheus inside the cluster to monitor internal metrics and one outside the cluster to monitor LBs and URLs.
Both send alerts to the same https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager that MUST be outside the cluster.
It took me about a week to configure everything properly.
It was worth it.