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Logging and monitoring#

Rackspace Kubernetes-as-a-Service (KaaS) provides state-of-the-art monitoring and logging tools to deliver the best user experience out-of-the-box. Proactive monitoring helps you detect problems early and act fast to ensure successful cloud infrastructure operation.

Log in to the logging and monitoring dashboards by using the URLs and credentials listed in Access the Rackspace KaaS dashboards. The provided credentials grant you read and write access to the Kibana and Grafana dashboards.

The Managed Services credentials for your cluster are stored in the installer/clusters/<cluster-name>/generated/auth/credentials.sh file.

Logging#

Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana, or EFK stack, is an industry standard for collecting, storing, and visualizing Kubernetes logs. Fluentd collects the Kubernetes containers logs and transmits them to Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch stores the logs and exposes them through a RESTful API. Kibana provides a graphical representation of the collected logs along with filtering and search capabilities. All components of EFK are deployed as Kubernetes Pods in the rackspace-system namespace.

Using Kibana#

You can access Kibana by using your Managed Services credentials and the URL listed in Access the Rackspace KaaS dashboards. To view and visualize the logs You need to configure index patterns. By default, Kibana suggests using the logstash-* index pattern. You can use the default setting or configure additional patterns as needed.

To configure Kibana, complete the following steps:

  1. Log in to the Kibana UI using the URL and credentials provided in Access the Rackspace KaaS dashboards.

  2. Go to DevTools > Console.

  3. List available indices:

    GET _cat/indices

    Alternatively, you can use curl -XGET "http://<path-to-Kibana-UI>_cat/indices".

    Example of system response:

    green open .monitoring-es-6-2018.06.21     woJ90oNBTY2IdrN8edLh2w 1 1 182422 648 344.5mb 172.2mb
green open .monitoring-es-6-2018.06.22     Br6Ioc8PRKu1ySQAt-d-cA 1 1 121440 432   229mb 114.8mb
green open .watcher-history-3-2018.06.20   sopRUohGTIWtPRGKf-VGEA 1 1   5760   0   9.6mb   4.8mb
green open .monitoring-kibana-6-2018.06.22 FE6508QfTyWDgc-WoQr_bg 1 1   5737   0   4.5mb   2.2mb
green open .triggered_watches              eca1efrIQN2E1XLiujeXEw 1 1      0   0   4.9mb   3.3mb
green open .kibana                         eKGb8L2XRvCoOcUWBsDA1A 1 1      3   0    90kb    45kb
green open .monitoring-es-6-2018.06.20     wH20lwaHT2ikRlwTCS1J_Q 1 1 182573 594 339.9mb   170mb
green open logstash-2018.06.20             iuaiT6abSsmYSFTN7laLoA 5 1 188593   0 264.8mb 132.4mb
green open .watches                        V1r07Q0wQ1WpHAsPsyNm3Q 1 1      4   0  30.7kb  19.3kb
green open logstash-2018.06.22             O9me9g3BSE6H-0jtKU5oYA 5 1 121590   0 162.1mb    81mb
green open .monitoring-kibana-6-2018.06.20 qZrbShReQka1Eufxb6iQ9A 1 1   8630   0   6.9mb   3.4mb
green open logstash-2018.06.21             jsk2AKCPRfSwkFgg3_TGkQ 5 1 181909   0 251.4mb 125.8mb
green open .monitoring-kibana-6-2018.06.21 Se2Qfs8WQtGTXlAzMd5Q-A 1 1   8632   0   6.7mb   3.3mb
green open .watcher-history-3-2018.06.22   ENhLUYkmRlOpxOx2HavA6w 1 1   3828   0   6.3mb   3.1mb
green open .watcher-history-3-2018.06.21   GQZ2-GvaSIq_dA7VTidHdA 1 1   5760   0   9.5mb   4.7mb

  4. Click Management > Index Pattern > Create Index Pattern.

  5. Configure the default logstash pattern or a custom pattern as needed.

  6. Click Create.

  7. In the left navigation panel, click Discover to view the logs.

    Example:

    X

The EFK stack provides rich capabilities to configure logging. For more information, see Kibana documentation, Fluentd documentation, and Elasticsearch documentation.

Monitoring#

While logging is important, the information provided in logs is incomplete without monitoring data. The Rackspace KaaS monitoring solution is based on the popular Prometheus and Grafana bundle. Prometheus is a powerful monitoring and alerting tool for distributed systems that assists cloud administrators in watching the health of not only the Kubernetes nodes but the workloads that run on the Kubernetes cluster as well. Data visualization powered by Grafana provides insights into the cluster health through a web-based graphical user interface.

Rackspace KaaS deploys two instances of Prometheus in each Kubernetes cluster. One instance is for Kubernetes applications monitoring and is for the Rackspace customers. The other instance monitors the Kubernetes cluster itself and is for Rackspace operators use. Customers can view the Prometheus internal dashboard but cannot modify any existing settings or add new settings. Both internal and customer-facing Prometheus instances are preconfigured as data resources in Grafana.

Using Grafana#

Rackspace KaaS provides preconfigured dashboards for the cluster resource monitoring including resource utilization analytics for Pods, Deployments, Kubernetes nodes, etcd nodes, as well as other useful information that might help you with cluster capacity planning.

When you create a new Pod in your Kubernetes cluster, Grafana automatically adds it to the preconfigured Pods monitoring dashboard. Therefore, you can monitor Pod resource utilization through the Pod dashboard. If you need to set up additional metrics to track the health of your Kubernetes applications, you can do so by creating or importing custom Grafana dashboards and using them with the customer-facing Prometheus instance.

To use Grafana, complete the following steps:

  1. Log in to the Grafana UI using the URL and credentials provided in Access the Rackspace KaaS dashboards.

  2. Click Home.

  3. Select a dashboard to display. For example, Pods.

    X

    You can select a namespace and Pod to display.

For more information about using Grafana and Prometheus, see Grafana documentation and Prometheus documentation.