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Monitor Kubernetes with sfPod

sfPod overview

sfPod is a collector that is installed on Kubernetes and runs as a DaemonSet on each worker node. It monitors the following elements of a Kubernetes environment:

  • Kubernetes metrics

    • Cluster metrics
    • Host metrics
    • Pod metrics
    • Container metrics
    • Events
    • Kubernetes services health– Kubelet, Kube-Proxy, API Server, Controller Manager, Core DNS
  • Kubernetes cluster logs

  • Poll Prometheus Exporters running on application pods

  • Pod Application Logs

sfPod installation

Below is short video explaining the sfPOD installation steps

Step 1: Create a Cloud profile

Create a cloud profile in SnappyFlow (or use an existing profile) and copy the profile key to use it while installing the sfPod in your cluster.

Step 2: Add Snappyflow helm chart

Login to any node that has network connectivity to Kubernetes master node and run the following commands

helm repo add snappyflow https://snappyflow.github.io/helm-charts 
helm repo list
helm repo update

Step 3: Installing helm chart

kubectl create namespace sfagent 
helm install <name> snappyflow/sfagent --set config.project_name=<my-project-name> --set config.app_name=<my-cluster-name> --set config.key=<profile key> --namespace sfagent
note

<my-cluster-name> Replace with any name, Cluster is discovered by this name on the Snappyflow.

<profile key> Replace with key copied from SnappyFlow.

Restricted sfPod Configuration

By default, sfPod is installed in a full configuration mode where it monitors all the elements. For a restricted configuration i.e. monitor only cluster logs or cluster metrics, user can use the flags outlined below:

--set config.cluster_monitoring=true/false

If true monitoring of cluster metrics and cluster logs is enabled. If this field is made false, cluster monitoring is switched off and only Prometheus polling and Centralized Application Log Monitoring are enabled

--set config.node_agent.drop_cluster_logs=true =>

If true, monitoring of Kubernetes cluster logs is disabled.

--set config.<doc_type>= false

sfPod organizes data collected by plugin/documentType. Example of some of the document types that are collected by sfPod include – pod, node, container, cluster_stats etc. User can disable collection of a documentType using this configuration. The detailed list of document types can be reviewed in Browse Data page of a Kubernetes cluster

--set config.app_view

By default sfPod sends pod and container metrics of tagged pods (I,e pods that have projectName and appName tags) to both Cluster Index and Project Index leading to duplication of metric data. This feature is enabled to enhance correlation of Application and Infra data. This feature can be switched-off if the flag= true.