Monitor Calico component metrics
Big picture
Use Prometheus configured for Calico components to get valuable metrics about the health of Calico.
Value
Using the open-source Prometheus monitoring and alerting toolkit, you can view time-series metrics from Calico components in the Prometheus or Grafana interfaces.
Features
This how-to guide uses the following Calico features:
Felix and Typha components configured with Prometheus configuration parameters (for consumption by Prometheus).
Concepts
About Prometheus
The Prometheus monitoring tool scrapes metrics from instrumented jobs and displays time series data in a visualizer (such as Grafana). For Calico, the “jobs” that Prometheus can harvest metrics from are the Felix and Typha components.
About Calico Felix and Typha components
Felix is a daemon that runs on every machine that provides endpoints (Calico nodes). Felix is the brains of Calico. Typha is an optional set of pods that extends Felix to scale traffic between Calico nodes and the datastore.
You can configure Felix and/or Typha to provide metrics to Prometheus.
Before you begin…
In this tutorial we assume that you have completed all other introductory tutorials and possess a running Kubernetes cluster with Calico, calicoctl and kubectl installed.
How to
This tutorial will go through the necessary steps to implement basic monitoring of Calico with Prometheus.
- Configure Calico to enable the metrics reporting.
- Create the namespace and service account that Promethues will need.
- Deploy and configure Prometheus.
- View the metrics in the Prometheus dashboard and create a simple graph.
1. Configure Calico to enable metrics reporting
Felix configuration
Felix prometheus metrics are disabled by default. You have to manually change your Felix configuration (prometheusMetricsEnabled) via calicoctl in order to use this feature.
Note: A comprehensive list of configuration values can be found at this link.
calicoctl patch felixConfiguration default --patch '{"spec":{"prometheusMetricsEnabled": true}}'
You should see an output like below:
Successfully patched 1 'FelixConfiguration' resource
Creating a service to expose Felix metrics
Promethues uses Kubernetes services to dynamically discover endpoints. Here you will create a service named felix-metrics-svc which Prometheus will use to discover all the Felix metrics endpoints.
Note: Felix by default uses port 9091 TCP to publish its metrics.
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: felix-metrics-svc
namespace: kube-system
spec:
selector:
k8s-app: calico-node
ports:
- port: 9091
targetPort: 9091
EOF
Typha Configuration
Note Typha implementation is optional, if you don’t have Typha in your cluster you should skip Typha configuration section.
If you are uncertain whether you have Typha in your cluster execute the following code:
kubectl get pods -A | grep typha
If your result is similar to what is shown below you are using Typha in your cluster.
Note The name suffix of pods shown below was dynamically generated. Your typha instance might have a different suffix.
kube-system calico-typha-56fccfcdc4-z27xj 1/1 Running 0 28h
kube-system calico-typha-horizontal-autoscaler-74f77cd87c-6hx27 1/1 Running 0 28h
You can enable Typha metrics to be consumed by Prometheus via two ways.
Creating a service to expose Typha metrics
Note: Typha uses port 9091 TCP by default to publish its metrics. However, if Calico is installed using Amazon yaml file this port will be 9093 as its set manually via TYPHA_PROMETHEUSMETRICSPORT environment variable.
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: typha-metrics-svc
namespace: kube-system
spec:
selector:
k8s-app: calico-typha
ports:
- port: 9093
targetPort: 9093
EOF
2. Cluster preparation
Namespace creation
Namespace isolates resources in your cluster. Here you will create a Namespace called calico-monitoring to hold your monitoring resources.
Note: Kubernetes namespaces guide can be found at this link.
kubectl apply -f -<<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
name: calico-monitoring
labels:
app: ns-calico-monitoring
role: monitoring
EOF
Service account creation
You need to provide Prometheus a serviceAccount with required permissions to collect information from Calico.
Note: A comprehensive guide to user roles and authentication can be found at this link.
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterRole
metadata:
name: calico-prometheus-user
rules:
- apiGroups: [""]
resources:
- endpoints
- services
- pods
verbs: ["get", "list", "watch"]
- nonResourceURLs: ["/metrics"]
verbs: ["get"]
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
name: calico-prometheus-user
namespace: calico-monitoring
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
name: calico-prometheus-user
roleRef:
apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
kind: ClusterRole
name: calico-prometheus-user
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
name: calico-prometheus-user
namespace: calico-monitoring
EOF
3. Install prometheus
Create prometheus config file
We can configure Prometheus using a ConfigMap to persistently store the desired settings.
Note: A comprehensive guide about configuration file can be found at this link.
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
name: prometheus-config
namespace: calico-monitoring
data:
prometheus.yml: |-
global:
scrape_interval: 15s
external_labels:
monitor: 'tutorial-monitor'
scrape_configs:
- job_name: 'prometheus'
scrape_interval: 5s
static_configs:
- targets: ['localhost:9090']
- job_name: 'felix_metrics'
scrape_interval: 5s
scheme: http
kubernetes_sd_configs:
- role: endpoints
relabel_configs:
- source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_service_name]
regex: felix-metrics-svc
replacement: $1
action: keep
- job_name: 'typha_metrics'
scrape_interval: 5s
scheme: http
kubernetes_sd_configs:
- role: endpoints
relabel_configs:
- source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_service_name]
regex: typha-metrics-svc
replacement: $1
action: keep
EOF
Create Prometheus pod
Now that you have a serviceaccount with permissions to gather metrics and have a valid config file for your Prometheus, it’s time to create the Prometheus pod.
kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: prometheus-pod
namespace: calico-monitoring
labels:
app: prometheus-pod
role: monitoring
spec:
serviceAccountName: calico-prometheus-user
containers:
- name: prometheus-pod
image: prom/prometheus
resources:
limits:
memory: "128Mi"
cpu: "500m"
volumeMounts:
- name: config-volume
mountPath: /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
subPath: prometheus.yml
ports:
- containerPort: 9090
volumes:
- name: config-volume
configMap:
name: prometheus-config
EOF
Check your cluster pods to assure pod creation was successful and prometheus pod is Running.
kubectl get pods prometheus-pod -n calico-monitoring
It should return something like the following.
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
prometheus-pod 1/1 Running 0 16s
4. View metrics
You can access prometheus dashboard by using port-forwarding feature.
kubectl port-forward pod/prometheus-pod 9090:9090 -n calico-monitoring
Browse to http://localhost:9090 you should be able to see prometheus dashboard. Type felix_active_local_endpoints in the Expression input textbox then hit the execute button. Console table should be populated with all your nodes and quantity of endpoints in each of them.
Note: A comprehensive list of metrics can be found at this link.
Push the Add Graph button, You should be able to see the metric plotted on a Graph.
Cleanup
By executing below commands, you will delete all the resource and services created by following this tutorial.
kubectl delete service felix-metrics-svc -n kube-system
kubectl delete service typha-metrics-svc -n kube-system
kubectl delete namespace calico-monitoring
kubectl delete ClusterRole calico-prometheus-user
kubectl delete clusterrolebinding calico-prometheus-user
Best practices
If you enable Calico metrics to Prometheus, a best practice is to use network policy to limit access to the Calico metrics endpoints. For details, see Secure Calico Prometheus endpoints.
If you are not using Prometheus metrics, we recommend disabling the Prometheus ports entirely for more security.