Step 5.1 Monitoring
K10 enables centralized monitoring of all its activity by integrating with Prometheus. In particular, it exposes a Prometheus endpoint from which a central system can extract data.
K10 can be installed with Grafana in the same namespace. This instance of Grafana is setup to automatically query metrics from K10's Prometheus instance. It also comes with a pre created dashboard that helps visualize the status of K10's operations such as backup, restore, export and import of applications.
Using K10's Prometheus Endpoint
By default, Prometheus is configured with persistent storage size 8GiB and retention period of 30d. That can be changed with:
--set prometheus.server.persistentVolume.size=<size>and
--set prometheus.server.retention=<days>.Prometheus requires Kubernetes API access to discover K10 pods to scrape their metrics. Thus, by default Role and RoleBinding entries are created in K10 namespace. However, if you set prometheus.rbac.create=true, global ClusterRole and ClusterRoleBinding will be created instead.
Integrating External Prometheus with K10
To integrate external Prometheus with K10, set the flags global.prometheus.external.host and global.prometheus.external.port. If external Prometheus is setup with a base URL, set the global.prometheus.external.baseURL flag. Make sure RBAC was enabled while setting up external Prometheus to enable target discovery.
It's also possible to disable kasten built-in prometheus by setting the flag prometheus.server.enabled: false
Using K10's Grafana Endpoint
Installation
To enable/disable Grafana and Prometheus, use this helm value while installing/upgrading K10. The helm value is enabled by default.
--set grafana.enabled=true
Step 5.2 Generating Reports
Step 5.3 Alerting
Configure K10 to send alerts when certain metrics exceed critical levels. In this way, you can quickly identify and fix issues.
Grafana can be used to create alerts to get notified moments after something unexpected happens in your system. An alert can be generated by specifying a condition or evaluation criteria and, these conditions can be configured using Alert rules. Each rule uses a query that fetches data from a data source.
Enable SMTP in Grafana instance
To enable the alerts to be sent by email, SMTP settings (Server, user, password), need to be provided to the Grafana instance. Below are the helm values, that must be used when installing/upgrading K10 to enable SMTP in Grafana.
helm get values k10 --output yaml --namespace=kasten-io > k10_val.yaml &&\
helm upgrade k10 kasten/k10 -f k10_val.yaml --namespace=kasten-io \
--set grafana."grafana\.ini".smtp.enabled=true \
--set grafana."grafana\.ini".smtp.host=<SMTP.SERVER.COM:PORT> \
--set grafana."grafana\.ini".smtp.skip_verify=true \
--set grafana."grafana\.ini".smtp.from_address=<EMAIL_TO_BE_USED_AS_SENDER> \
--set grafana."grafana\.ini".smtp.from_name=<SENDER_NAME_FOR_THE_EMAIL> \
--set grafana."grafana\.ini".smtp.user=<SMTP_USER> \
--set grafana."grafana\.ini".smtp.password=<SMTP_PASSWORD>
Alert Rules
The condition on which the alerts should be fired can be configured using alert rules. A new alert rule can be created by going to the dashboard's edit option and then clicking on the Alert tab at the bottom of the page.
Contact Points
Contact points are used to configure the communication medium for the alerts that are going to be generated. For example, in some scenarios, it might be useful to get a slack message as soon as an alert is fired. In that case, slack must be configured as a contact point. To see a list of all the contact point types, refer to this Grafana documentation.
A contact point can be configured by going to the Alerting dashboard and then clicking on new contact point under the Contact points tab.
Notification Policies
Once the alerts rule and contact points have been configured, the relationship between these two configurations is established by creating a Notification policy.
A notification policy can be configured by going to the Alerting dashboard and then clicking on New specific policy under the Notification policies tab.
Get ready for Step 6 of your onboarding journey. At the next step, we will review the steps to maintain and upgrade Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes.
If you need more help getting started, you can post your question in the comments section below or contact us at veeam.university@veeam.com any time and someone from the Customer Success team will be there to assist you.