OpenShift Monitoring User Guide

Overview

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is an enterprise application platform, built for containers that use Kubernetes and offering full control over Kubernetes environments.

OpenShift integration enables you to retrieve all metrics and metadata available in your OpenShift environment and display them as dataviews in Geneos. You can query services of your OpenShift running environment, see the number of pods, list the available images you can deploy, check the ability to deploy builds, and tail logs from a pod or from a container.

The integration provides a Gateway configuration file that enables monitoring of (Undefined variable: Integrations/openshift.openshift-name) through a set of pre-configured Toolkit samplers.

This guide walks you through the integration process.

Intended audience

This user guide is intended for experienced Geneos users who want to set up and configure an integration between Geneos and OpenShift.

As a user, you should be familiar with Python and with general administration of OpenShift web console.

Prerequisites

The following requirements must be met on the machine where the Netprobe is installed:

• Geneos version 4.11.x or higher.
• Python 3.4 or higher.
• The oc client binary, version 3.11 or higher. It can be downloaded from the official OpenShiftGitHub repository.
  • The package contains an executable file named oc. Use the login option to generate your OpenShift configuration file that contains a token that allows the connection to your OpenShift environment.
• Access to an OpenShift environment version 3.10 or higher or access to the OpenShift online service.
  • You need to be authenticated to OpenShift from the host where your Netprobe is running.

Note: The support and compatibility that ITRS provides are only limited to the currently supported versions of OpenShift. In addition, not all resources covered in our samplers might be available in your OpenShift environment.

Setup and configuration

The OpenShift monitoring integration is largely pre-configured and involves these primary steps:

1. Download the integration files from the resources site.
2. Load the integration file in the Gateway Setup Editor.
3. Associate the samplers with a managed entity.
4. Configure the dataviews.

Note: The include files are intended to be read-only and should not be edited (unless the integration specifically requires for them to be modified). This is because include files can be shared between a few instances of a Gateway and best practice is to share them in their default state. It is also to make the upgrades and maintenance process of the integration files easier. All configuration should be carried out in your local Gateway files instead.

Download the integration files

1. Download the integration package geneos-integration-openshift-<version>.zip from the ITRS Downloads site.
2. As a best practice, save the files on the same machine where your Gateway is running.

The integration package includes the include/openshiftMonitoring.xml file. This is a Gateway configuration file (also called an include file) containing Toolkit samplers configured for OpenShift monitoring integration.

Load the integration files

To load the integration files into the Gateway Setup Editor, follow these steps:

1. Open Gateway Setup Editor.
2. In the Navigation panel, click Includes to create a new file.
3. Enter the location of the file to include in the Location field. In this example, it is include/openshiftMonitoring.xml.
4. Update the Priority field. This can be any value except 1. If you input a priority of 1, the Gateway Setup Editor returns an error when you save your changes.
5. Expand the file location in the Include section.
6. Select Click to load.
7. Click Yes to load the new include file.

Success: Gateway configuration now appears in the Includes section.

Associate the samplers with a managed entity

After you have loaded the configuration file, the OpenShift samplers become available. These samplers are associated with a pre-defined Type. To associate the samplers with a managed entity, follow these steps:

1. In the Gateway Setup Editor, create a new managed entity by right-clicking the Managed entities folder.
2. Under the Basic tab for the new managed entity, add a pre-configured OpenShift type.
3. Specify the environment associated with the samplers. By default, this is OpenShift.
4. Apply the managed entity to the running Netprobe.
5. Click the Validate button to check your configuration and save if everything is correct.

Success: After you save your changes to the managed entity, the OpenShift dataviews appear under the managed entity on the state tree.

For more information about include files, see the 'Include' files in Gateway Setup Editor.

Configure the samplers

This integration provides a number of samplers, each with default dataview. You can customise some of them to show details of specific pods, nodes or containers. Samplers that can be customised are:

• PodHealth
• PodContainers
• NodeHealth

To configure a sampler with a particular pod, node or container, use the environment variables. The value of the variable is a name or uid of what you want to see the details of. For more information, see Environment variables in OpenShift Monitoring Technical Reference.

Below you can see an example configuration of a specific PodHealth sampler.

Commands

When viewing the metrics you can also communicate with the OpenShift environment by streaming the logs out of that environment. This is achieved by using the preconfigured commands.

The following commands are available:

• For pods:
  • Describe pod — displays metadata and build information for this pod.
  • Get pods log — used if there is only one container. If there are more, an error is displayed.
  • Get pods containers log — used if there is more than one container. You must specify a container name to get the logs for that container.
• For nodes:
  • Describe node — displays metadata of the selected event.
• For events:
  • Describe event — displays metadata of the selected event.

For more information about using and configuring commands, see Gateway Commands.

Environment configuration

The default environment configuration is created by the openshiftMonitoring.xml script. You can create a new environment based on the default and modify the environment variables according to your system.

Note: Standard variable scoping rules apply when variable reference is used in include files. Please take note of that when creating your own variables. For more information, see Variable Scoping and Resolution in User Variables and Environments.

For more information on the environment variables used in this integration, see the Environment variables in OpenShift Monitoring Technical Reference

Further reading

After you have included the monitoring samplers, you can learn about its dataviews and environment configuration in the OpenShift Monitoring Technical Reference.