Prometheus Monitoring Mixin for Kubernetes

NOTE: This project is alpha stage. Flags, configuration, behaviour and design may change significantly in following releases.

A set of Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alerts for Kubernetes.

How to use

This mixin is designed to be vendored into the repo with your infrastructure config. To do this, use jsonnet-bundler:

You then have three options for deploying your dashboards

Generate the config files and deploy them yourself
Use ksonnet to deploy this mixin along with Prometheus and Grafana
Use prometheus-operator to deploy this mixin (TODO)

Generate config files

You can manually generate the alerts, dashboards and rules files, but first you must install some tools:

$ go get github.com/jsonnet-bundler/jsonnet-bundler/cmd/jb
$ brew install jsonnet

Then, grab the mixin and its dependencies:

$ git clone https://github.com/kubernetes-monitoring/kubernetes-mixin
$ cd kubernetes-mixin
$ jb install

Finally, build the mixin:

$ make prometheus_alerts.yaml
$ make prometheus_rules.yaml
$ make dashboards_out

The prometheus_alerts.yaml and prometheus_rules.yaml file then need to passed to your Prometheus server, and the files in dashboards_out need to be imported into you Grafana server. The exact details will depending on how you deploy your monitoring stack to Kubernetes.

Using with prometheus-ksonnet

Alternatively you can also use the mixin with prometheus-ksonnet, a ksonnet module to deploy a fully-fledged Prometheus-based monitoring system for Kubernetes:

Make sure you have the ksonnet v0.8.0:

$ brew install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ksonnet/homebrew-tap/82ef24cb7b454d1857db40e38671426c18cd8820/ks.rb
$ brew pin ks
$ ks version
ksonnet version: v0.8.0
jsonnet version: v0.9.5
client-go version: v1.6.8-beta.0+$Format:%h$

In your config repo, if you don't have a ksonnet application, make a new one (will copy credentials from current context):

$ ks init <application name>
$ cd <application name>
$ ks env add default

Grab the kubernetes-jsonnet module using and its dependencies, which include the kubernetes-mixin:

$ go get github.com/jsonnet-bundler/jsonnet-bundler/cmd/jb
$ jb init
$ jb install github.com/kausalco/public/prometheus-ksonnet

Assuming you want to run in the default namespace ('environment' in ksonnet parlance), add the follow to the file environments/default/main.jsonnet:

local prometheus = import "prometheus-ksonnet/prometheus-ksonnet.libsonnet";

prometheus {
  _config+:: {
    namespace: "default",
  },
}

Apply your config:

$ ks apply default

Using prometheus-operator

TODO

Customising the mixin

Kubernetes-mixin allows you to override the selectors used for various jobs, to match those used in your Prometheus set.

In a new directory, add a file mixin.libsonnet:

local kubernetes = import "kubernetes-mixin/mixin.libsonnet";

kubernetes {
  _config+:: {
    kubeStateMetricsSelector: 'job="kube-state-metrics"',
    cadvisorSelector: 'job="kubernetes-cadvisor"',
    nodeExporterSelector: 'job="kubernetes-node-exporter"',
    kubeletSelector: 'job="kubernetes-kubelet"',
  },
}

Then, install the kubernetes-mixin:

$ jb init
$ jb install github.com/kubernetes-monitoring/kubernetes-mixin

Generate the alerts, rules and dashboards:

$ jsonnet -J vendor -S -e 'std.manifestYamlDoc((import "mixin.libsonnet").prometheusAlerts)' > alerts.yml
$ jsonnet -J vendor -S -e 'std.manifestYamlDoc((import "mixin.libsonnet").prometheusRules)' >files/rules.yml
$ jsonnet -J vendor -m files/dashboards -e '(import "mixin.libsonnet").grafanaDashboards'

Background

For more motivation, see "The RED Method: How to instrument your services" talk from CloudNativeCon Austin.
For more information about monitoring mixins, see this design doc.