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Gateway metrics

Use OpenTelemetry collectors to scrape metrics from your gateway proxies and visualize these metrics in Grafana.

About

Metrics are essential to gain insight into the health and performance of your gateway proxies. OpenTelemetry is a flexible open source framework that provides a set of APIs, libraries, and instrumentation to help capture and export telemetry data, such as metrics. The framework can also be used to collect traces and logs from your apps. Then, you can use observability tools, such as Grafana or Prometheus, to visualize your metrics so that you can analyze the health of your gateway and troubleshoot issues more easily.

In this guide, you deploy an OpenTelemetry collector that scapes metrics from the Gloo Gateway proxies in the data plane, the Gloo Gateway pods in the control plane, and the external auth and rate limiting add-ons. The metrics that are collected by the OpenTelemetry collector are exposed in Prometheus format. To visualize these metrics, you also deploy a Grafana instance that scrapes the metrics from the OpenTelemetry collector.

info

If you do not want to deploy an OpenTelemetry collector and Grafana, you can quickly see the raw Prometheus metrics that are automatically exposed on the gateway proxy by accessing the Prometheus metrics on your gateway.

Port-forward the gateway deployment on port 19000.

  kubectl -n gloo-system port-forward deployment/gloo-proxy-http 19000

Access the gateway metrics by reviewing the Prometheus statistics.

Before you begin

Follow the Get started guide to install Gloo Gateway, set up a gateway resource, and deploy the httpbin sample app.

Get the external address of the gateway and save it in an environment variable.

  export INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS=$(kubectl get svc -n gloo-system gloo-proxy-http -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0]['hostname','ip']}")
echo $INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS

  kubectl port-forward deployment/gloo-proxy-http -n gloo-system 8080:8080

Set up an OpenTelemetry collector

Add the Helm repository for OpenTelemetry.

  helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
helm repo update

Install the OpenTelemetry collector in your cluster. This command sets up pipelines that scrape metrics from the gateway proxies, Gloo Gateway control plane, and external auth and rate limiting add-ons, and exposes them in Prometheus format.

  helm upgrade --install opentelemetry-collector open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector \
--version 0.97.1 \
--set mode=deployment \
--set image.repository="otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib" \
--set command.name="otelcol-contrib" \
--namespace=otel \
--create-namespace \
-f -<<EOF
clusterRole:
  create: true
  rules:
  - apiGroups:
    - ''
    resources:
    - 'pods'
    - 'nodes'
    verbs:
    - 'get'
    - 'list'
    - 'watch'
ports:
  promexporter:
    enabled: true
    containerPort: 9099
    servicePort: 9099
    protocol: TCP
config:
  receivers:
    prometheus/gloo-dataplane:
      config:
        scrape_configs:
        # Scrape the Gloo Gateway proxies
        - job_name: gloo-gateways
          honor_labels: true
          kubernetes_sd_configs:
          - role: pod
          relabel_configs:
            - action: keep
              regex: kube-gateway
              source_labels:
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_label_gloo
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_scrape]
              action: keep
              regex: true
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_path]
              action: replace
              target_label: __metrics_path__
              regex: (.+)
            - action: replace
              source_labels:
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_ip
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_port
              separator: ':'
              target_label: __address__
            - action: labelmap
              regex: __meta_kubernetes_pod_label_(.+)
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_namespace]
              action: replace
              target_label: kube_namespace
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_name]
              action: replace
              target_label: pod
    prometheus/gloo-controlplane:
      config:
        scrape_configs:
        # Scrape the Gloo Gateway control plane
        - job_name: gloo-gateways
          honor_labels: true
          kubernetes_sd_configs:
          - role: pod
          relabel_configs:
            - action: keep
              regex: gloo
              source_labels:
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_label_gloo
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_scrape]
              action: keep
              regex: true
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_path]
              action: replace
              target_label: __metrics_path__
              regex: (.+)
            - action: replace
              source_labels:
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_ip
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_port
              separator: ':'
              target_label: __address__
            - action: labelmap
              regex: __meta_kubernetes_pod_label_(.+)
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_namespace]
              action: replace
              target_label: kube_namespace
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_name]
              action: replace
              target_label: pod
    prometheus/gloo-addons:
      config:
        scrape_configs:
        # Scrape the extauth and ratelimit workloads
        - job_name: gloo-gateways
          honor_labels: true
          kubernetes_sd_configs:
          - role: pod
          relabel_configs:
            - action: keep
              regex: extauth|rate-limit
              source_labels:
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_label_gloo
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_scrape]
              action: keep
              regex: true
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_path]
              action: replace
              target_label: __metrics_path__
              regex: (.+)
            - action: replace
              source_labels:
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_ip
              - __meta_kubernetes_pod_annotation_prometheus_io_port
              separator: ':'
              target_label: __address__
            - action: labelmap
              regex: __meta_kubernetes_pod_label_(.+)
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_namespace]
              action: replace
              target_label: kube_namespace
            - source_labels: [__meta_kubernetes_pod_name]
              action: replace
              target_label: pod
  exporters:
    prometheus:
      endpoint: 0.0.0.0:9099
    debug: {}
  service:
    pipelines:
      metrics:
        receivers: [prometheus/gloo-dataplane, prometheus/gloo-controlplane, prometheus/gloo-addons]
        processors: [batch]
        exporters: [prometheus]
EOF

Verify that the OpenTelemetry collector pod is running.

  kubectl get pods -n otel

Example output:

  NAME                                       READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
opentelemetry-collector-6d658bf47c-hw6v8   1/1     Running   0          12m

Set up Grafana

Deploy Grafana and other Prometheus components in your cluster. The following example uses the kube-prometheus-stack community Helm chart to install these components.

  helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

helm upgrade --install kube-prometheus-stack \
prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack \
--version 61.2.0 \
--namespace monitoring \
--create-namespace \
--values - <<EOF
alertmanager:
  enabled: false
grafana: 
  service: 
    type: LoadBalancer
    port: 3000
nodeExporter:
  enabled: false   
prometheus: 
  prometheusSpec: 
    ruleSelectorNilUsesHelmValues: false
    serviceMonitorSelectorNilUsesHelmValues: false
    podMonitorSelectorNilUsesHelmValues: false
EOF

Verify that the Prometheus stack’s components are up and running.

  kubectl get pods -n monitoring

Example output:

  NAME                                                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kube-prometheus-stack-grafana-86844f6b47-frwn9              3/3     Running   0          20s
kube-prometheus-stack-kube-state-metrics-7c8d64d446-6cs7m   1/1     Running   0          21s
kube-prometheus-stack-operator-75fc8896c7-r7bgk             1/1     Running   0          20s
prometheus-kube-prometheus-stack-prometheus-0               2/2     Running   0          17s

Create a PodMonitor resource to scrape metrics from the OpenTelemetry collector.

  kubectl apply -n otel -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: PodMonitor
metadata:
  name: otel-monitor
spec:
  podMetricsEndpoints:
  - interval: 30s
    port: promexporter
    scheme: http
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app.kubernetes.io/name: opentelemetry-collector
EOF

Save the sample Grafana dashboard configuration as envoy.json.

Import the Grafana dashboard.

  kubectl -n monitoring create cm envoy-dashboard \
--from-file=envoy.json
kubectl label -n monitoring cm envoy-dashboard grafana_dashboard=1

Visualize metrics in Grafana

Generate traffic for the httpbin app.

  for i in {1..5}; do curl -v http://$INGRESS_GW_ADDRESS:8080/headers -H "host: www.example.com:8080"; done

Open Grafana and log in to Grafana by using the username admin and password prom-operator.

  open "http://$(kubectl -n monitoring get svc kube-prometheus-stack-grafana -o jsonpath="{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0]['hostname','ip']}"):3000"

  kubectl port-forward deployment/kube-prometheus-stack-grafana -n monitoring 3000

Go to Dashboards > Envoy to open the dashboard that you imported. Verify that you see the traffic that you generated for the httpbin app.

Cleanup

You can optionally remove the resources that you set up as part of this guide.

Remove the configmap for the Envoy dashboard.

  kubectl delete cm envoy-dashboard -n monitoring

Remove the PodMonitor.

  kubectl delete podmonitor otel-monitor -n otel

Uninstall Grafana.

  helm uninstall kube-prometheus-stack -n monitoring

Uninstall the OpenTelemetry collector.

  helm uninstall opentelemetry-collector -n otel

Remove the monitoring and otel namespaces.

  kubectl delete namespace monitoring otel

Gateway metrics

About link

Before you begin link

Set up an OpenTelemetry collector link

Set up Grafana link

Visualize metrics in Grafana link

Cleanup link