Using logging and monitoring

This page explains how to use Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring as well as Prometheus and Grafana for logging and monitoring of your Google Distributed Cloud implementation. For a summary of the configuration options available, see Logging and monitoring overview.

Using Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring

The following sections explain how to use Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Google Distributed Cloud clusters.

Monitored resources

Monitored resources are how Google represents resources such as clusters, nodes, Pods, and containers. To learn more, refer to Cloud Monitoring's Monitored resource types documentation.

To query for logs and metrics, you'll need to know at least these resource labels:

  • project_id: Project ID for the ID of the cluster's logging-monitoring project. You provided this value in the stackdriver.projectID field of your cluster configuration file.

  • location: A Google Cloud region where you want to store Cloud Logging logs and Cloud Monitoring metrics. It's a good idea to choose a region that is near your on-premises data center. You provided this value during installation in the stackdriver.clusterLocation field of your cluster configuration file.

  • cluster_name: Cluster name that you chose when you created the cluster.

    You can retrieve the cluster_name value for either the admin or the user cluster by inspecting the Stackdriver custom resource:

      kubectl -n kube-system get stackdrivers stackdriver -o yaml | grep 'clusterName:'

Accessing log data

You can access logs using the Logs Explorer in Google Cloud console. For example, to access a container's logs:

  1. Open the Logs Explorer in Google Cloud console for your project.
  2. Find logs for a container by:
    1. Clicking on the top-left log catalog drop-down box and selecting Kubernetes Container.
    2. Selecting the cluster name, then the namespace, and then a container from the hierarchy.

Creating dashboards to monitor cluster health

Google Distributed Cloud clusters are, by default, configured to monitor system and container metrics. After you create a cluster (admin or user), a best practice is to create the following dashboards with Cloud Monitoring to let your Google Distributed Cloud operations team monitor cluster health:

The dashboards are automatically created during admin cluster installation if Cloud Monitoring is enabled.

This section describes how to create these dashboards. For more information about the dashboard creation process described in the following sections, see Managing dashboards by API.

Prerequisites

Your Google Account must have the following permissions to create dashboards:

  • monitoring.dashboards.create
  • monitoring.dashboards.delete
  • monitoring.dashboards.update

You'll have these permissions if your account has one of the following roles. You can check your permissions (in the Google Cloud console):

  • monitoring.dashboardEditor
  • monitoring.editor
  • Project editor
  • Project owner

In addition, to use gcloud (gcloud CLI) to create dashboards, your Google Account must have the serviceusage.services.use permission.

Your account will have this permission if it has one of the following roles:

  • roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageConsumer
  • roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin
  • roles/owner
  • roles/editor
  • Project editor
  • Project owner

Create a control plane uptime dashboard

The Google Distributed Cloud control plane consists of the API server, scheduler, controller manager, and etcd. To monitor the status of the control plane, create a dashboard that monitors the state of these components.

  1. Download the dashboard configuration: control-plane-uptime.json.

  2. Create a custom dashboard with the configuration file by running the following command:

    gcloud monitoring dashboards create --config-from-file=control-plane-uptime.json

  3. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, or use the following button:

    Go to Monitoring

  4. Select Resources > Dashboards and view the dashboard named GKE on-prem control plane uptime. The control plane uptime of each user cluster is collected from separate namespaces within the admin cluster. The namespace_name field is the user cluster name.

  5. Optionally create alerting policies.

Create a Pod status dashboard

To create a dashboard that includes the phase of each Pod, and the restart times and resource usage of each container, perform the following steps.

  1. Download the dashboard configuration: pod-status.json.

  2. Create a custom dashboard with the configuration file by running the following command:

    gcloud monitoring dashboards create --config-from-file=pod-status.json

  3. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, or use the following button:

    Go to Monitoring

  4. Select Resources > Dashboards and view the dashboard named GKE on-prem pod status.

  5. Optionally create alerting policies.

Create a node status dashboard

To create an node status dashboard to monitor the node condition, CPU, memory and disk usage, perform the following steps:

  1. Download the dashboard configuration: node-status.json.

  2. Create a custom dashboard with the configuration file by running the following command:

    gcloud monitoring dashboards create --config-from-file=node-status.json

  3. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, or use the following button:

    Go to Monitoring

  4. Select Resources > Dashboards and view the dashboard named GKE on-prem node status.

  5. Optionally create alerting policies.

Create a VM health status dashboard

A VM health status dashboard monitors CPU, memory, and disk resource contention signals for VMs in the admin cluster and user clusters.

To create an VM health status dashboard:

  1. Make sure stackdriver.disableVsphereResourceMetrics is set to false. See User cluster configuration file.

  2. Download the dashboard configuration: vm-health-status.json.

  3. Create a custom dashboard with the configuration file by running the following command:

    gcloud monitoring dashboards create --config-from-file=vm-health-status.json

  4. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, or use the following button:

    Go to Monitoring

  5. Select Resources > Dashboards and view the dashboard named GKE on-prem VM health status.

  6. Optionally create alerting policies.

Configuring Stackdriver component resources

When you create a cluster, Google Distributed Cloud automatically creates a Stackdriver custom resource. You can edit the spec in the custom resource to override the default values for CPU and memory requests and limits for a Stackdriver component, and you can separately override the default storage size and storage class.

Override default values for requests and limits for CPU and memory

To override these defaults, do the following:

  1. Open your Stackdriver custom resource in a command line editor:

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system edit stackdriver stackdriver

    where KUBECONFIG is the path to your kubeconfig file for the cluster. This can be either an admin cluster or user cluster.

  2. In the Stackdriver custom resource, add the resourceAttrOverride field under the spec section:

    resourceAttrOverride:
      POD_NAME_WITHOUT_RANDOM_SUFFIX/CONTAINER_NAME:
        LIMITS_OR_REQUESTS:
          RESOURCE: RESOURCE_QUANTITY

    Note that the resourceAttrOverride field overrides all existing default limits and requests for the component you specify. An example file looks like the following:

    apiVersion: addons.sigs.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: Stackdriver
metadata:
  name: stackdriver
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  projectID: my-project
  clusterName: my-cluster
  clusterLocation: us-west-1a
  resourceAttrOverride:
    stackdriver-prometheus-k8s/prometheus-server:
      limits:
        cpu: 500m
        memory: 3000Mi
      requests:
        cpu: 300m
        memory: 2500Mi

  3. Save changes and quit your command line editor.

  4. Check the health of your Pods:

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system get pods | grep stackdriver

    For example, a healthy Pod looks like the following:

    stackdriver-prometheus-k8s-0                                2/2     Running   0          5d19h

  5. Check the Pod spec of the component to make sure the resources are set correctly.

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system describe pod POD_NAME

    where POD_NAME is the name of the Pod you just changed. For example, stackdriver-prometheus-k8s-0

    The response looks like the following:

      Name:         stackdriver-prometheus-k8s-0
  Namespace:    kube-system
  ...
  Containers:
    prometheus-server:
      Limits:
        cpu: 500m
        memory: 3000Mi
      Requests:
        cpu: 300m
        memory: 2500Mi
      ...

Override storage size defaults

To override these defaults, do the following:

  1. Open your Stackdriver custom resource in a command line editor:

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system edit stackdriver stackdriver

  2. Add the storageSizeOverride field under the spec section. You can use the component stackdriver-prometheus-k8s or stackdriver-prometheus-app. The section takes this format:

    storageSizeOverride:
STATEFULSET_NAME: SIZE

    This example uses the statefulset stackdriver-prometheus-k8s and size 120Gi.

    apiVersion: addons.sigs.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: Stackdriver
metadata:
  name: stackdriver
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  projectID: my-project
  clusterName: my-cluster
  clusterLocation: us-west-1a
  storageSizeOverride:
    stackdriver-prometheus-k8s: 120Gi

  3. Save, and quit your command line editor.

  4. Check the health of your Pods:

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system get pods | grep stackdriver
    For example, a healthy Pod looks like the following: 
    stackdriver-prometheus-k8s-0                                2/2     Running   0          5d19h

  5. Check the Pod spec of the component to make sure the storage size is correctly overridden.

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system describe statefulset STATEFULSET_NAME

    The response looks like the following:

    Volume Claims:
 Name:          my-statefulset-persistent-volume-claim
 StorageClass:  my-storage-class
 Labels:
 Annotations:
 Capacity:      120Gi
 Access Modes:  [ReadWriteOnce]

Override storage class defaults

Prerequisite

You must first create a StorageClass you want to use.

To override the default storage class for persistent volumes claimed by logging and monitoring components:

  1. Open your Stackdriver custom resource in a command line editor:

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system edit stackdriver stackdriver

    where KUBECONFIG is the path to your kubeconfig file for the cluster. This can be either an admin cluster or user cluster.

  2. Add the storageClassName field under the spec section:

    storageClassName: STORAGECLASS_NAME

    Note that the storageClassName field overrides the existing default storage class, and applies to all logging and monitoring components with persistent volumes claimed. An example file looks like the following:

    apiVersion: addons.sigs.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: Stackdriver
metadata:
name: stackdriver
namespace: kube-system
spec:
projectID: my-project
clusterName: my-cluster
clusterLocation: us-west-1a
proxyConfigSecretName: my-secret-name
enableVPC: 
optimizedMetrics: true
storageClassName: my-storage-class

  3. Save changes.

  4. Check the health of your Pods:

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system get pods | grep stackdriver

    For example, a healthy Pod looks like the following:

    stackdriver-prometheus-k8s-0                                1/1     Running   0          5d19h

  5. Check the Pod spec of a component to make sure the storage class is set correctly.

    kubectl --kubeconfig=KUBECONFIG -n kube-system describe statefulset STATEFULSET_NAME

    For example, using the stateful set stackdriver-prometheus-k8s, the response looks like the following:

    Volume Claims:
 Name:          stackdriver-prometheus-data
 StorageClass:  my-storage-class
 Labels:
 Annotations:
 Capacity:      120Gi
 Access Modes:  [ReadWriteOnce]

Accessing metrics data

You can choose from over 1,500 metrics by using Metrics Explorer. To access Metrics Explorer, do the following:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, or use the following button:

    Go to Monitoring

  2. Select Resources > Metrics Explorer.

Accessing Monitoring metadata

Metadata is used indirectly via metrics. When you filter for metrics in Monitoring Metrics Explorer, you see options to filter metrics by metadata.systemLabels and metadata.userLabels. System labels are labels such as node name and Service name for Pods. User labels are labels assigned to Pods in the Kubernetes YAML files in the "metadata" section of the Pod specification.

Default Cloud Monitoring quota limits

Google Distributed Cloud monitoring has a default limit of 6000 API calls per minute for each project. If you exceed this limit, your metrics may not be displayed. If you need a higher monitoring limit, request one through the Google Cloud console.

Known issue: Cloud Monitoring error condition

(Issue ID 159761921)

Under certain conditions, the default Cloud Monitoring pod, deployed by default in each new cluster, can become unresponsive. When clusters are upgraded, for example, storage data can become corrupted when pods in statefulset/prometheus-stackdriver-k8s are restarted.

Specifically, monitoring pod stackdriver-prometheus-k8s-0 can be caught in a loop when corrupted data prevents prometheus-stackdriver-sidecar writing to the cluster storage PersistentVolume.

You can manually diagnose and recover the error following the steps below.

Diagnosing the Cloud Monitoring failure

When the monitoring pod has failed, the logs will report the following:

{"log":"level=warn ts=2020-04-08T22:15:44.557Z caller=queue_manager.go:534 component=queue_manager msg=\"Unrecoverable error sending samples to remote storage\" err=\"rpc error: code = InvalidArgument desc = One or more TimeSeries could not be written: One or more points were written more frequently than the maximum sampling period configured for the metric.: timeSeries[0-114]; Unknown metric: kubernetes.io/anthos/scheduler_pending_pods: timeSeries[196-198]\"\n","stream":"stderr","time":"2020-04-08T22:15:44.558246866Z"}

{"log":"level=info ts=2020-04-08T22:15:44.656Z caller=queue_manager.go:229 component=queue_manager msg=\"Remote storage stopped.\"\n","stream":"stderr","time":"2020-04-08T22:15:44.656798666Z"}

{"log":"level=error ts=2020-04-08T22:15:44.663Z caller=main.go:603 err=\"corruption after 29032448 bytes: unexpected non-zero byte in padded page\"\n","stream":"stderr","time":"2020-04-08T22:15:44.663707748Z"}

{"log":"level=info ts=2020-04-08T22:15:44.663Z caller=main.go:605 msg=\"See you next time!\"\n","stream":"stderr","time":"2020-04-08T22:15:44.664000941Z"}

Recovering from the Cloud Monitoring error

To recover Cloud Monitoring manually:

  1. Stop cluster monitoring. Scale down the stackdriver operator to prevent monitoring reconciliation: 

    kubectl --kubeconfig /ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBCONFIG --namespace kube-system scale deployment stackdriver-operator --replicas 0

  2. Delete the monitoring pipeline workloads: 

    kubectl --kubeconfig /ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBCONFIG --namespace kube-system delete statefulset stackdriver-prometheus-k8s

  3. Delete the monitoring pipeline PersistentVolumeClaims (PVCs): 

    kubectl --kubeconfig /ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBCONFIG --namespace kube-system delete pvc -l app=stackdriver-prometheus-k8s

  4. Restart cluster monitoring. Scale up the stackdriver operator to reinstall a new monitoring pipeline and resume reconciliation: 

    kubectl --kubeconfig /ADMIN_CLUSTER_KUBCONFIG --namespace kube-system scale deployment stackdriver-operator --replicas=1

Prometheus and Grafana

The following sections explain how to use Prometheus and Grafana with Google Distributed Cloud clusters.

Enabling Prometheus and Grafana

Starting in Google Distributed Cloud version 1.2, you can choose whether to enable or disable Prometheus and Grafana. In new user clusters, Prometheus and Grafana are disabled by default.

  1. Your user cluster has a Monitoring object named monitoring-sample. Open the object for editing:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] edit \
   monitoring monitoring-sample --namespace kube-system

    where [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] is the kubeconfig file for your user cluster.

  2. To enable Prometheus and Grafana, set enablePrometheus to true. To disable Prometheus and Grafana, set enablePrometheus to false:

    apiVersion: addons.k8s.io/v1alpha1
kind: Monitoring
metadata:
 labels:
   k8s-app: monitoring-operator
 name: monitoring-sample
 namespace: kube-system
spec:
 channel: stable
 ...
 enablePrometheus: true

  3. Save your changes by closing the editing session.

Known issue

In user clusters, Prometheus and Grafana get automatically disabled during upgrade. However, the configuration and metrics data are not lost.

To work around this issue, after the upgrade, open monitoring-sample for editing and set enablePrometheus to true.

Accessing monitoring metrics from Grafana dashboards

Grafana displays metrics gathered from your clusters. To view these metrics, you need to access Grafana's dashboards:

  1. Get the name of the Grafana Pod running in a user cluster's kube-system namespace:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] -n kube-system get pods

    where [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] is the user cluster's kubeconfig file.

  2. The Grafana Pod has an HTTP server listening on TCP localhost port 3000. Forward a local port to port 3000 in the Pod, so that you can view Grafana's dashboards from a web browser.

    For example, suppose the name of the Pod is grafana-0. To forward port 50000 to port 3000 in the Pod, enter this command::

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] -n kube-system port-forward grafana-0 50000:3000

  3. From a web browser, navigate to http://localhost:50000.

  4. On the login page, enter admin for username and password.

  5. If login is successful, you will see a prompt to change the password. After you have changed the default password, the user cluster's Grafana Home Dashboard should load.

  6. To access other dashboards, click the Home drop-down menu in the top-left corner of the page.

For an example of using Grafana, see Create a Grafana dashboard.

Accessing alerts

Prometheus Alertmanager collects alerts from the Prometheus server. You can view these alerts in a Grafana dashboard. To view the alerts, you need to access the dashboard:

  1. The container in the alertmanager-0 Pod listens on TCP port 9093. Forward a local port to port 9093 in the Pod:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] port-forward \
   -n kube-system alertmanager-0 50001:9093

  2. From a web browser, navigate to http://localhost:50001.

Changing Prometheus Alertmanager configuration

You can change Prometheus Alertmanager's default configuration by editing your user cluster's monitoring.yaml file. You should do this if you want to direct alerts to a specific destination, rather than keep them in the dashboard. You can learn how to configure Alertmanager in Prometheus' Configuration documentation.

To change the Alertmanager configuration, perform the following steps:

  1. Make a copy of the user cluster's monitoring.yaml manifest file:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] -n kube-system \
   get monitoring monitoring-sample -o yaml > monitoring.yaml

  2. To configure Alertmanager, make changes to the fields under spec.alertmanager.yml. When you're finished, save the changed manifest.

  3. Apply the manifest to your cluster:

    kubectl apply --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONIFG] -f monitoring.yaml

Scaling Prometheus resources

The default monitoring configuration supports up to five nodes. For larger clusters, you can adjust the Prometheus Server resources. The recommendation is 50m cores of CPU and 500Mi of memory per cluster node. Make sure that your cluster contains two nodes, each with sufficient resources to fit Prometheus. For more information, refer to Resizing a user cluster.

To change Prometheus Server resources, perform the following steps:

  1. Make a copy of the user cluster's monitoring.yaml manifest file:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] -n kube-system get monitoring monitoring-sample -o yaml > monitoring.yaml

  2. To override resources, make changes to the fields under spec.resourceOverride. When you're finished, save the changed manifest. Example:

    spec:
  resourceOverride:
  - component: Prometheus
    resources:
      requests:
        cpu: 300m
        memory: 3000Mi
      limits:
        cpu: 300m
        memory: 3000Mi

  3. Apply the manifest to your cluster:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] apply -f monitoring.yaml

Create a Grafana dashboard

You've deployed an application that exposes a metric, verified that the metric is exposed, and verified that Prometheus scrapes the metric. Now you can add the application-level metric to a custom Grafana dashboard.

To create a Grafana dashboard, perform the following steps:

  1. If necessary, gain access to Grafana.
  2. From the Home Dashboard, click the Home drop-down menu in the top-left corner of the page.
  3. From the right-side menu, click New dashboard.
  4. From the New panel section, click Graph. An empty graph dashboard appears.
  5. Click Panel title, then click Edit. The bottom Graph panel opens to the Metrics tab.
  6. From the Data Source drop-down menu, select user. Click Add query, and enter foo in the search field.
  7. Click the Back to dashboard button in the top-right corner of the screen. Your dashboard is displayed.
  8. To save the dashboard, click Save dashboard in the top-right corner of the screen. Choose a name for the dashboard, then click Save.

Disabling in-cluster monitoring

To disable in-cluster monitoring, revert the changes made to the monitoring-sample object:

  1. Open the monitoring-sample object for editing:

    kubectl --kubeconfig USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG edit \
   monitoring monitoring-sample --namespace kube-system

    Replace USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG with the kubeconfig file for your user cluster.

  2. To disable Prometheus and Grafana, set enablePrometheus to false:

       apiVersion: addons.k8s.io/v1alpha1
   kind: Monitoring
   metadata:
     labels:
       k8s-app: monitoring-operator
     name: monitoring-sample
     namespace: kube-system
   spec:
     channel: stable
     ...
     enablePrometheus: false

  3. Save your changes by closing the editing session.

  4. Confirm that the prometheus-0, prometheus-1 and grafana-0 statefulsets have been deleted: 

    kubectl --kubeconfig USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG get pods --namespace kube-system

Example: Adding application-level metrics to a Grafana dashboard

The following sections walk you through adding metrics for an application. In this section, you complete the following tasks:

  • Deploy an example application that exposes a metric called foo.
  • Verify that Prometheus exposes and scrapes the metric.
  • Create a custom Grafana dashboard.

Deploy the example application

The example application runs in a single Pod. The Pod's container exposes a metric, foo, with a constant value of 40.

Create the following Pod manifest, pro-pod.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: prometheus-example
  annotations:
    prometheus.io/scrape: 'true'
    prometheus.io/port: '8080'
    prometheus.io/path: '/metrics'
spec:
  containers:
  - image: registry.k8s.io/prometheus-dummy-exporter:v0.1.0
    name: prometheus-example
    command:
    - /bin/sh
    - -c
    - ./prometheus_dummy_exporter --metric-name=foo --metric-value=40 --port=8080

Then apply the Pod manifest to your user cluster:

kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] apply -f pro-pod.yaml

Verify that the metric is exposed and scraped

  1. The container in the prometheus-example pod listens on TCP port 8080. Forward a local port to port 8080 in the Pod:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] port-forward prometheus-example 50002:8080

  2. To verify that the application exposes the metric, run the following command:

    curl localhost:50002/metrics | grep foo

    The command returns the following output:

    # HELP foo Custom metric
# TYPE foo gauge
foo 40

  3. The container in the prometheus-0 Pod listens on TCP port 9090. Forward a local port to port 9090 in the Pod:

    kubectl --kubeconfig [USER_CLUSTER_KUBECONFIG] port-forward prometheus-0 50003:9090

  4. To verify that Prometheus is scraping the metric, navigate to http://localhost:50003/targets, which should take you to the prometheus-0 Pod under the prometheus-io-pods target group.

  5. To view metrics in Prometheus, navigate to http://localhost:50003/graph. From the search field, enter foo, then click Execute. The page should display the metric.