This article assumes you have already deployed CockroachDB on a single Kubernetes cluster.
Despite CockroachDB's various built-in safeguards against failure, it is critical to actively monitor the overall health and performance of a cluster running in production and to create alerting rules that promptly send notifications when there are events that require investigation or intervention.
Configure Prometheus
Every node of a CockroachDB cluster exports granular timeseries metrics formatted for easy integration with Prometheus, an open source tool for storing, aggregating, and querying timeseries data. This section shows you how to orchestrate Prometheus as part of your Kubernetes cluster and pull these metrics into Prometheus for external monitoring.
This guidance is based on CoreOS's Prometheus Operator, which allows a Prometheus instance to be managed using built-in Kubernetes concepts.
If you're on Hosted GKE, before starting, make sure the email address associated with your Google Cloud account is part of the cluster-admin
RBAC group, as shown in Deploy CockroachDB with Kubernetes.
From your local workstation, edit the
cockroachdb
service to add theprometheus: cockroachdb
label:$ kubectl label svc cockroachdb prometheus=cockroachdb
service/cockroachdb labeled
This ensures that only the
cockroachdb
(not thecockroach-public
service) is being monitored by a Prometheus job.$ kubectl label svc cockroachdb prometheus=cockroachdb
service/cockroachdb labeled
This ensures that only the
cockroachdb
(not thecockroach-public
service) is being monitored by a Prometheus job.$ kubectl label svc my-release-cockroachdb prometheus=cockroachdb
service/my-release-cockroachdb labeled
This ensures that there is a Prometheus job and monitoring data only for the
my-release-cockroachdb
service, not for themy-release-cockroach-public
service.Determine the latest version of CoreOS's Prometheus Operator and run the following to download and apply the latest
bundle.yaml
definition file:Note:Be sure to specify the latest CoreOS Prometheus Operator version in the following command, in place of this example's use of version
v0.58.0
.$ kubectl apply \ -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/prometheus-operator/prometheus-operator/v0.58.0/bundle.yaml \ --server-side
customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/alertmanagers.monitoring.coreos.com serverside-applied customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/podmonitors.monitoring.coreos.com serverside-applied customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/probes.monitoring.coreos.com serverside-applied customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/prometheuses.monitoring.coreos.com serverside-applied customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/prometheusrules.monitoring.coreos.com serverside-applied customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/servicemonitors.monitoring.coreos.com serverside-applied customresourcedefinition.apiextensions.k8s.io/thanosrulers.monitoring.coreos.com serverside-applied clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/prometheus-operator serverside-applied clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/prometheus-operator serverside-applied deployment.apps/prometheus-operator serverside-applied serviceaccount/prometheus-operator serverside-applied service/prometheus-operator serverside-applied
Confirm that the
prometheus-operator
has started:$ kubectl get deploy prometheus-operator
NAME READY UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE prometheus-operator 1/1 1 1 27s
Download our Prometheus manifest:
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/master/cloud/kubernetes/prometheus/prometheus.yaml
Note:By default, this manifest uses the secret name generated by the CockroachDB Kubernetes Operator. If you generated your own certificates and keys when starting CockroachDB, be sure that
ca.secret.name
matches the name of the node secret you created.Apply the Prometheus manifest. This creates the various objects necessary to run a Prometheus instance:
$ kubectl apply -f prometheus.yaml
serviceaccount/prometheus created clusterrole.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/prometheus created clusterrolebinding.rbac.authorization.k8s.io/prometheus created servicemonitor.monitoring.coreos.com/cockroachdb created prometheus.monitoring.coreos.com/cockroachdb created
Access the Prometheus UI locally and verify that CockroachDB is feeding data into Prometheus:
Port-forward from your local machine to the pod running Prometheus:
$ kubectl port-forward prometheus-cockroachdb-0 9090
Go to http://localhost:9090 in your browser.
To verify that each CockroachDB node is connected to Prometheus, go to Status > Targets. The screen should look like this:
To verify that data is being collected, go to Graph, enter the
sys_uptime
variable in the field, click Execute, and then click the Graph tab. The screen should like this:
Tip:Prometheus auto-completes CockroachDB time series metrics for you, but if you want to see a full listing, with descriptions, port-forward as described in Access the DB Console and then point your browser to http://localhost:8080/_status/vars.
For more details on using the Prometheus UI, see their official documentation.
Configure Alertmanager
Active monitoring helps you spot problems early, but it is also essential to send notifications when there are events that require investigation or intervention. This section shows you how to use Alertmanager and CockroachDB's starter alerting rules to do this.
Download our
alertmanager-config.yaml
configuration file:$ curl -O \ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/master/cloud/kubernetes/prometheus/alertmanager-config.yaml
Edit the
alertmanager-config.yaml
file to specify the desired receivers for notifications. Initially, the file contains a placeholder web hook.Add this configuration to the Kubernetes cluster as a secret, renaming it to
alertmanager.yaml
and labelling it to make it easier to find:$ kubectl create secret generic alertmanager-cockroachdb \ --from-file=alertmanager.yaml=alertmanager-config.yaml
secret/alertmanager-cockroachdb created
$ kubectl label secret alertmanager-cockroachdb app=cockroachdb
secret/alertmanager-cockroachdb labeled
Warning:The name of the secret,
alertmanager-cockroachdb
, must match the name used in thealertmanager.yaml
file. If they differ, the Alertmanager instance will start without configuration, and nothing will happen.Use our
alertmanager.yaml
file to create the various objects necessary to run an Alertmanager instance, including a ClusterIP service so that Prometheus can forward alerts:$ kubectl apply \ -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/master/cloud/kubernetes/prometheus/alertmanager.yaml
alertmanager.monitoring.coreos.com/cockroachdb created service/alertmanager-cockroachdb created
Verify that Alertmanager is running:
Port-forward from your local machine to the pod running Alertmanager:
$ kubectl port-forward alertmanager-cockroachdb-0 9093
Go to http://localhost:9093 in your browser. The screen should look like this:
Ensure that the Alertmanagers are visible to Prometheus by opening http://localhost:9090/status. The screen should look like this:
Add CockroachDB's starter alerting rules:
$ kubectl apply \ -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/master/cloud/kubernetes/prometheus/alert-rules.yaml
prometheusrule.monitoring.coreos.com/prometheus-cockroachdb-rules created
Ensure that the rules are visible to Prometheus by opening http://localhost:9090/rules. The screen should look like this:
Verify that the
TestAlertManager
example alert is firing by opening http://localhost:9090/alerts. The screen should look like this:To remove the example alert:
Use the
kubectl edit
command to open the rules for editing:$ kubectl edit prometheusrules prometheus-cockroachdb-rules
Remove the
dummy.rules
block and save the file:- name: rules/dummy.rules rules: - alert: TestAlertManager expr: vector(1)