Collect metrics from the PA organization

You can collect and store metrics your components produce over time. This section describes how to scrape metrics from workloads in Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped for system monitoring and data observability.

The Observability platform provides a custom API to scrape running workloads in your GDC project namespace through monitoring targets. You must deploy a MonitoringTarget custom resource to your project namespace in the org admin cluster. Based on this custom resource, the Observability platform starts collecting data for system monitoring.

The MonitoringTarget custom resource instructs the system monitoring pipeline to scrape pods of your project. Then, the collected metrics become visible in the system monitoring instance of your project to let you evaluate Observability data from your applications.

To configure the MonitoringTarget custom resource, specify the selected pods of your project namespace for collecting metrics. These pods must expose an HTTP endpoint to deliver metrics in a Prometheus exposition format, for example, the OpenMetrics format. You can customize settings in the resource such as the scrapping frequency, the metrics endpoint of the pods, labels, and annotations.

Before you begin

To get the permissions you need to collect metrics or view collected metrics, ask your Organization IAM Admin to grant you one of the following roles in the platform-obs namespace:

  • Monitoring Target PA Creator: creates MonitoringTarget custom resources. Request the Monitoring Target PA Creator (monitoringtarget-pa-creator) cluster role.
  • Monitoring Target PA Editor: edits or modifies MonitoringTarget custom resources. Request the Monitoring Target PA Editor (monitoringtarget-pa-editor) cluster role.
  • Monitoring Target PA Viewer: views MonitoringTarget custom resources. Request the Monitoring Target PA Viewer (monitoringtarget-pa-viewer) cluster role.

Configure metric collection

Work through the following steps to configure the Observability platform for metric collection:

  1. Identify the GDC project from where you want to collect metrics for system monitoring.

  2. Optional: Include the following annotations in the deployment file of the container from where you want to collect metrics.

    apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: CONTAINER_NAME
  namespace: PROJECT_NAMESPACE
  labels:
    app: CONTAINER_NAME
  annotations:
    # These annotations are not required. They demonstrate selecting
    # pod metric endpoints via annotations.
    prometheus.io/path: /metrics
    prometheus.io/port: \"2112\"
    prometheus.io/scheme: http

    Replace the following:

    • PROJECT_NAMESPACE: the namespace of your project
    • CONTAINER_NAME: the container name prefix from which you want to collect metrics

  3. Configure the MonitoringTarget custom resource, specifying the selected pods for collecting your metrics, the metrics endpoint of those pods, the scrapping frequency, and any additional settings. For information on how to configure this resource, see Configure the MonitoringTarget custom resource.

  4. Deploy the MonitoringTarget custom resource into the admin cluster in the same namespace as the pods you want to scrape. The Observability service starts collecting metrics from the specified pods.

Configure the MonitoringTarget custom resource

The MonitoringTarget custom resource configures the Observability service to scrape workloads and get metrics. It contains the following information:

  • The pods and the endpoints from which you want to collect metrics in a GDC project.
  • The frequency to scrape the selected pods for system and server monitoring.
  • The way you want to modify the labels on the metric streams if needed.

Choose between the statically defined and the pod annotations methods to determine the metrics endpoint for your selected pods. Configure the MonitoringTarget custom resource using one of those methods.

Statically defined

Work through the following steps to expose metrics from your selected pods on a static endpoint:

  1. Declare to the system that a port you choose is open on the pod from which you want to scrape metrics. The following example shows how to declare port 2112 on the pod specification:

    ...
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: CONTAINER_NAME
          ports:
            - containerPort: 2112
...

  2. Configure the MonitoringTarget custom resource with the statically defined metrics endpoint. You must configure the MonitoringTarget to match the port you chose in the previous step. The following YAML file shows a MonitoringTarget configuration example where every selected pod has to expose metrics on the same endpoint: http://CONTAINER_NAME:2112/metrics

      apiVersion: monitoring.gdc.goog/v1
  kind: MonitoringTarget
  metadata:
    # Choose the same namespace as the workload pods
    namespace: PROJECT_NAMESPACE
    name: CONTAINER_NAME
  spec:
    selector:
        # Choose pod-labels to consider for this job
        # Optional: Map of key-value pairs.
        # Default: No filtering by label.
        # To consider every pod in the project namespace, remove selector fields.
        # If you followed the optional step on the Collect metrics section,
        # then you can include app: CONTAINER_NAME in matchLabels.
      matchLabels:
        key: value
    podMetricsEndpoints:
      port:
        value: 2112
      path:
        # Choose any value for your endpoint.
        # The /metrics value is an example.
        value: /metrics
      scheme:
        value: http

Replace the following:

  • PROJECT_NAMESPACE: the namespace of your project
  • CONTAINER_NAME: the container name prefix from which you want to collect metrics

Pod annotations

The following YAML file shows a MonitoringTarget configuration example using annotations. This specification tells the custom resource to gather the metrics endpoint information from annotations on the selected pods. With this method, each pod can have different metrics endpoints for system monitoring and data observability.

apiVersion: monitoring.gdc.goog/v1
kind: MonitoringTarget
metadata:
  # Choose the same namespace as the workload pods
  namespace: PROJECT_NAMESPACE
  name: CONTAINER_NAME
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: CONTAINER_NAME
  podMetricsEndpoints:
    port:
      annotation: prometheus.io/port
    path:
      annotation: prometheus.io/path
    scheme:
      annotation: prometheus.io/scheme

Replace the following:

  • PROJECT_NAMESPACE: the namespace of your project
  • CONTAINER_NAME: the container name prefix from which you want to collect metrics

The following YAML file shows an example for the specification of the MonitoringTarget custom resource:

apiVersion: monitoring.gdc.goog/v1
kind: MonitoringTarget
metadata:
  # Choose the same namespace as the workload pods
  namespace: PROJECT_NAMESPACE
  name: string
spec:
  # Choose matching pattern that identifies pods for this job
  # Optional
  # Relationship between different selectors: AND
  selector:
    # Choose clusters to consider for this job
    # Optional: List
    # Default: All clusters applicable to this project.
    # Relationship between different list elements: OR
    matchClusters:
      - string

    # Choose pod-labels to consider for this job
    # Optional: Map of key-value pairs.
    # Default: No filtering by label.
    # Relationship between different pairs: AND
    matchLabels:
      key1: value1

    # Choose annotations to consider for this job
    # Optional: Map of key-value pairs
    # Default: No filtering by annotation
    # Relationship between different pairs: AND
    matchAnnotations:
      key1: value1

  # Configure the endpoint exposed for this job
  podMetricsEndpoints:
    # Choose port either via static value or annotation
    # Optional
    # Annotation takes priority
    # Default: static port 80
    port:
      value: integer
      annotation: string

    # Choose path either via static value or annotation
    # Optional
    # Annotation takes priority
    # Default: static path /metrics
    path:
      value: string
      annotation: string

    # Choose scheme either via static value (http or https) or annotation
    # Optional
    # Annotation takes priority
    # Default: static scheme http
    scheme:
      value: string
      annotation: string

    # Choose the frequency to scrape the metrics endpoint defined in podMetricsEndpoints
    # Optional
    # Default: 60s
    scrapeInterval: string

    # Dynamically rewrite the label set of a target before it gets scraped.
    # https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/#relabel_config
    # Optional
    # Default: No filtering by label
    metricsRelabelings:
      - sourceLabels:
          - string
        separator: string
        regex: string
        action: string
        targetLabel: string
        replacement: string

Replace PROJECT_NAMESPACE with the namespace of your project.