Heimdall

Heimdall watches Ingresses in your Kubernetes cluster to create PrometheusRules based off annotations and PrometheusRule templates.

Configuring PrometheusRules via annotations makes it easy for cluster users to set up relevant alerts for Ingresses with a single-line annotation. Cluster operators can configure Heimdall and other components to ensure cluster users have a consistent set of PrometheusRules.

PrometheusRule Templates

Heimdall needs templates for the PrometheusRules it will create. These are standard go template files. An example template can be found here. By default, Heimdall will look for a folder called templates to find these in. You can override this with the --templates flag.

Example Annotations RVU uses

We do have some custom Prometheus Rules we use, which give you an idea on what alerts we create in an automated fashion. These can be deleted, modified and new ones can be created by putting the templates in this folder.

Your Ingress / Deployment must have annotations in the form of: com.uswitch.heimdall/<prometheus-rule-name>: <threshold>

For example:

com.uswitch.heimdall/5xx-rate: "0.001"

This will create a PrometheusRule for an Ingress, based on the 5xx-rate.tmpl template with a threshold of 0.001.

Available annotations for Ingress:

com.uswitch.heimdall/5xx-rate - alerts if the 5XX rate goes above the given threshold for at least 1 minute

Available annotations for Deployment:

com.uswitch.heimdall/replicas-availability-deployment- alerts if the given part of the total replicas are not running for 5 minutes. (0.1 would alert if 1 pod goes unavailable out of a total of 10 pods)

Running Heimdall locally

Once the kubernetes context is set to a local cluster, skaffold + kustomize can help deploying the local Heimdall version to the cluster. For that you might want to change the Container registry URL from quay to your own container registry. References are found in /kube/base/deployment.yaml & /kube/overlays/skaffold/kustomization.yaml & skaffold.yaml

The command to build and deploy the application is skaffold dev

If you'd like to generate a new deployment.yaml file for deploying purposes, you can run kustomize build kube/base | tee -a deployment.yaml.

Requirements

Heimdall uses PrometheusRules – custom resource definitions of Prometheus Operator.

PrometheusRule CRD must be added to the cluster prior to deploying Heimdall:

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/coreos/prometheus-operator/master/example/prometheus-operator-crd/prometheusrule.crd.yaml

Your monitoring pipeline would likely depend on Prometheus Operator to:

manage Prometheus StatefulSets
manage Alertmanager StatefulSets
watch PrometheusRule CRDs and create corresponding ConfigMaps
reload Prometheus instance when ConfigMap changes

Flags

--help                   Show context-sensitive help.
--kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG  Path to kubeconfig.
--namespace=""           Namespace to monitor
--debug                  Debug mode
--templates="templates"  Directory for the templates
--sync-interval=1m       Synchronize list of Ingress resources this frequently

Migration to v0.5+

In the past, Heimdall relied on its own Alerts type to manage Prometheus rules.
Since version v0.5 Heimdall no longer support custom Alerts type in favor of more widespread PrometheusRule CRD from the prometheus-operator project.
You can find a simple script which accepts an Alerts YAML to stdin and prints a PrometheusRules YAML into stdout in contrib folder: convert-alerts-to-promrules.py