Cluster Monitoring

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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.

This page is for Kubernetes deployments that are not using the CockroachDB operator. For guidance specific to the CockroachDB operator, read Cluster Monitoring with the CockroachDB operator.

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.

1. From your local workstation, edit the cockroachdb service to add the prometheus: cockroachdb label:

   $ kubectl label svc cockroachdb prometheus=cockroachdb 

   service/cockroachdb labeled 

   This ensures that only the cockroachdb (not the cockroach-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 the cockroach-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 the my-release-cockroach-public service.

2. 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 

3. 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 

4. 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 Public 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.

5. 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 

6. Access the Prometheus UI locally and verify that CockroachDB is feeding data into Prometheus:

   1. Port-forward from your local machine to the pod running Prometheus:

      $ kubectl port-forward prometheus-cockroachdb-0 9090 

   2. Go to http://localhost:9090 in your browser.

   3. To verify that each CockroachDB node is connected to Prometheus, go to Status > Targets. The screen should look like this:

      

   4. 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.

1. Download our alertmanager-config.yaml configuration file:

   $ curl -O \ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/master/cloud/kubernetes/prometheus/alertmanager-config.yaml 

2. Edit the alertmanager-config.yaml file to specify the desired receivers for notifications. Initially, the file contains a placeholder web hook.

3. 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 the alertmanager.yaml file. If they differ, the Alertmanager instance will start without configuration, and nothing will happen.

4. 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 

5. Verify that Alertmanager is running:

   1. Port-forward from your local machine to the pod running Alertmanager:

      $ kubectl port-forward alertmanager-cockroachdb-0 9093 

   2. Go to http://localhost:9093 in your browser. The screen should look like this:

      

6. Ensure that the Alertmanagers are visible to Prometheus by opening http://localhost:9090/status. The screen should look like this:

   

7. 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 

8. Ensure that the rules are visible to Prometheus by opening http://localhost:9090/rules. The screen should look like this:

   

9. Verify that the TestAlertManager example alert is firing by opening http://localhost:9090/alerts. The screen should look like this:

   

10. To remove the example alert:

    1. Use the kubectl edit command to open the rules for editing:

       $ kubectl edit prometheusrules prometheus-cockroachdb-rules 

    2. Remove the dummy.rules block and save the file:

       - name: rules/dummy.rules rules: - alert: TestAlertManager expr: vector(1) 

apiVersion: v1 data: logging.yaml: | sinks: file-groups: dev: channels: DEV filter: WARNING fluent-servers: ops: channels: [OPS, HEALTH, SQL_SCHEMA] address: 127.0.0.1:5170 net: tcp redact: true security: channels: [SESSIONS, USER_ADMIN, PRIVILEGES, SENSITIVE_ACCESS] address: 127.0.0.1:5170 net: tcp auditable: true kind: ConfigMap metadata: name: logconfig namespace: cockroach-operator-system 

spec: logConfigMap: logconfig 

sinks: stderr: channels: OPS redact: true 

See also

• Monitoring and Alerting
• Metrics