Tag Archives: monitoring

vROPs - Kubernetes - Prometheus - Telegraf - Header

vRealize Operations – Monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus and Telegraf

VMware, Kubernetes, , , , , ,

In this post, I will cover how to deploy Prometheus and the Telegraf exporter and configure so that the data can be collected by vRealize Operations.

Overview

Delivers intelligent operations management with application-to-storage visibility across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. Using policy-based automation, operations teams automate key processes and improve the IT efficiency.

Is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. Prometheus collects and stores its metrics as time series data, i.e. metrics information is stored with the timestamp at which it was recorded, alongside optional key-value pairs called labels.

There are several libraries and servers which help in exporting existing metrics from third-party systems as Prometheus metrics. This is useful for cases where it is not feasible to instrument a given system with Prometheus metrics directly (for example, HAProxy or Linux system stats).

Telegraf is a plugin-driven server agent written by the folks over at InfluxData for collecting & reporting metrics. By using the Telegraf exporter, the following Kubernetes metrics are supported:

Why do it this way with three products?

You can actually achieve this with two products (vROPs and cAdvisor for example). Using vRealize Operations and a metric exporter that the data can be grabbed from in the Kubernetes cluster. By default, Kubernetes offers little in the way of metrics data until you install an appropriate package to do so.

Many customers have now decided upon using Prometheus for their metrics needs in their Modern Applications world due to the flexibility it offers.

Therefore, this integration provides a way for vRealize Operations to collect the data through an existing Prometheus deploy and enrich the data further by providing a context-aware relationship view between your virtualisation platform and the Kubernetes platform which runs on top of it.

vRealize Operations Management Pack for Kubernetes supports a number of Prometheus exporters in which to provide the relevant data. In this blog post we will focus on Telegraf.

You can view sample deployments here for all the supported types. This blog will show you an end-to-end setup and deployment.

Prerequisites
  • Administrative access to a vRealize Operations environment
  • Access to a Kubernetes cluster that you want to monitor
  • Install Helm if you have not already got it setup on the machine which has access to your Kubernetes cluster
  • Clone this GitHub repo to your machine to make life easier
git clone https://github.com/saintdle/vrops-prometheus-telegraf.git
vrops - git clone saintdle vrops-prometheus-telegraf.git
Information Gathering

Note down the following information:

  • Cluster API Server information
kubectl cluster-info

vROPs - kubectl cluster-info

  • Access details for the Kubernetes cluster
    • Basic Authentication – Uses HTTP basic authentication to authenticate API requests through authentication plugins.
    • Client Certification Authentication – Uses client certificates to authenticate API requests through authentication plugins.
    • Token Authentication – Uses bearer tokens to authenticate API requests through authentication plugin

In this example I will be using “Client Certification Authentication” using my current authenticated user by running:

kubectl config view --minify --raw

vROPs - kubectl config view --minify --raw

  • Get your node names and IP addresses
kubectl get nodes -o wide

vROPs - kubectl get nodes -o wide

Install the Telegraf Kubernetes Plugin

Continue reading vRealize Operations – Monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus and Telegraf →

Tanzu Mission Control Header

VMware Tanzu Mission Control – Getting started with your first cluster

VMware, Kubernetes, , , , ,

In this blog post we will cover the following topics

- What is Tanzu Mission Control?
- So, this isn't just for VMware environments?
- Getting Started Tanzu Mission Control
- - TMC Resource Hierarchy
- - Creating a Cluster Group
- - Attaching a cluster to Tanzu Mission Control
- - Viewing your Cluster Objects
- - - Overview
- - - Nodes
- - - Namespaces
- - - Workloads
- Where can I demo/test/trial this myself?

The follow up blog posts are;

Tanzu Mission Control 
- Getting Started Tanzu Mission Control 
- Cluster Inspections 
- Workspaces and Policies  
- Data Protection 
- Deploying TKG clusters to AWS 
- Upgrading a provisioned cluster 
- Delete a provisioned cluster 
- TKG Management support and provisioning new clusters
- TMC REST API - Postman Collection
- Using custom policies to ensure Kasten protects a deployed application

What is Tanzu Mission Control?

Tanzu Mission control is a cloud offering, which gives you a single point of control, monitoring and management, regardless of the Kubernetes deployment and their location (e.g Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, OpenShift Container Platform, Azure Kubernetes to name but a few).

Key Capabilities;

  • Manage Kubernetes Cluster Lifecycle through the deployment and day 2 operations
  • Attach Clusters for centralized operations and management
  • Centralized policy management
    • Apply access, network and container registry policies consistently across your Kubernetes clusters and namespaces
  • Global visibility for diagnosing and troubleshooting issues with your Kubernetes clusters
  • Inspection runbooks to validate the configuration of your clusters
    • Current offerings are;
      • Conformance; validating binaries running in your cluster to ensure proper configuration and running.
      • CIS benchmark; evaluation against the CIS Benchmark for Kubernetes published by the Center for Internet Security.
      • Lite; node conformance test to validate your nodes meet the Kubernetes requirements.

So, this isn’t just for VMware environments?

Nope, this is a cloud and Kubernetes neutral offering. You can attach CNCF conformant Kubernetes clusters to Tanzu Mission Control no matter where they are running: on vSphere, in any public clouds, or through other Kubernetes vendors.

Getting Started Tanzu Mission Control

TMC Resource Hierarchy

In the Tanzu Mission Control resource hierarchy, there are three levels at which you can specify policies.

  • Organization
  • Object groups (Cluster groups and Workspaces)
  • Kubernetes objects (Clusters and Namespaces)

You can set direct policies for a given object, but each object can also inherit based on the parent objects. So pretty much what you’ve been used to in the past with policies and hierarchies.

Creating a Cluster Group

A Cluster Group is a logical object to bring together multiple Kubernetes clusters. You can set user access policies to be able to view/edit/control cluster group objects and their child objects (clusters).

Cluster groups provide an infrastructure view, and all clusters must be attached to a group.

To create a Cluster Group;

  • Select the Cluster Group from the navigation
  • Click New Cluster Group
  • Supply a name, description and labels are optional and can be edited after creation

Tanzu Mission Control Create Clusters Group

Tanzu Mission Control New Cluster Group Continue reading VMware Tanzu Mission Control – Getting started with your first cluster →

vRealize Operations Openshift Container Platform Monitoring header

vRealize Operations – Monitoring OpenShift Container Platform environments

VMware, Kubernetes, , , ,

The latest release of  vRealize Operations (the “manager” part of the product name has now been dropped), brings the ability to manage your Kubernetes environments from the vSphere infrastructure up.

The Kubernetes integration in vRealize Operations 8.1;

  • vSphere with Kubernetes integration:
    • Ability to discover vSphere with Kubernetes objects as part of the vCenter Server inventory.
    • New summary pages for Supervisor Cluster, Namespaces, Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, and vSphere Pods.
    • ​Out-of-the-box dashboards, alerts, reports, and views for vSphere with Kubernetes.
  • The VMware Management Packs that are new and those that are updated for vRealize Operations Manager 8.1 are:
    • VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for Container Monitoring 1.4.3

Where does OpenShift Container Platform fit in?

All though the above highlighted release notes point towards vSphere with Kubernetes (aka project pacific), the Container monitoring management pack has been available for a while and has received a number of updates.

vRealize Operations Management Pack for Containers compatiibility

This management pack can be used with any of your Kubernetes setups. Bringing components into your infrastructure monitoring view;

  • Kubernetes;
    • Clusters
    • Nodes
    • Pods
    • Containers
    • Services

So this means you can add in your OCP environment for monitoring.

Configuring vRealize Operations to monitor your OpenShift Clusters

Grab the latest Container monitoring management pack to be installed in your vRealize Operations environment.

  1. Log in to the vRealize Operations Manager with administrator privileges.
  2. In the menu, select Administration and in the left pane select Solutions > Repository.
  3. On the Repository tab, click Add/Upgrade.
  4. Browse to locate the temporary folder and select the PAK file.
  5. Click Upload. The upload might take several minutes.
  6. Read and accept the EULA,and click Next.
  7. When the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Container Monitoring is installed, click Finish.

vRealize Operations add Management Pack

To link any Kubernetes to your environment for monitoring, you need to install the cAdvisor Daemon.  For OCP I used the cAdvisor YAML Definition on HostPort, secondly you need to create some credentials to authenticate to your cluster from your connection in vROPs. Continue reading vRealize Operations – Monitoring OpenShift Container Platform environments →