cluster-api-monitoring chart

Giant Swarm offers a cluster-api-monitoring App which can be installed in management clusters. Here we define the cluster-api-monitoring chart with its templates and default configuration.

What is this app?

cluster-api-monitoring is a dedicated kube-state-metrics (KSM) installation with the alpha feature of CustomResourceStateMetrics enabled.

Why did we add it?

As the current alpha feature has a wide range of limitations and the discussion about new features is still ongoing with the KSM community we had to build this app from a recently created fork of KSM. The goal of this fork is a contribution back to the upstream community but was initialy used to verify if it's worth the effort to maintain a custom metrics exporter, based on KSM golang packages.

To not harm the existing KSM installation in kube-system and make fast progress towards monitoring of ClusterAPI related CRs + the fact that KSM is running from a forked version we decided to start creating a new app (Please note the container image build section).

Who should use it?

Everyone which needs information from CustomResource objects exposed as metric.

Installing

There are several ways to install this app onto a workload cluster.

• Using our web interface.
• By creating an App resource in the management cluster as explained in Getting started with App Platform.

Configuring

If you for example want the conditions of all CRs of type GitRepository exposed as metric flux_gitrepository_status_conditions there are two things to do:

First of all, cluster-api-monitoring needs a configuration to know how the status condition should be generated as metric.

Therefore, create a file called flux_gitrepository.yaml under helm/cluster-api-monitoring/configuration. For flux it's possible to get a gauge metric based on conditions:

labelsFromPath:
  name: [metadata, name]
  url: [spec, url]
  namespace: [metadata, namespace]
metrics:
  - name: status_conditions
    each:
      type: Gauge
      gauge:
        path:
          - status
          - conditions
        valueFrom:
          - status
        labelFromKey: reason
        labelsFromPath:
          type: [type]

As we now have a configuration for GitRepositories we have to enable this configuration in the values.yaml by creating a new object in the monitoredResource map:

monitoredResources:
  flux:
    gitrepository:
      group: source.toolkit.fluxcd.io
      kind: GitRepository
      version: v1beta2