Traffic Metrics

Kuma facilitates consistent traffic metrics across all data plane proxies in your mesh.

You add metrics to a mesh configuration, or to an individual Dataplane configuration if you need, for example, to override the default metrics port that’s already in use on the specified machine.

Kuma provides full integration with Prometheus:

  • Each proxy can expose its metrics in Prometheus format.
  • Because metrics are part of the mesh configuration, Prometheus can automatically find every proxy in the mesh.

To collect metrics from Kuma, you need to first expose metrics from proxies and then configure Prometheus to collect them.

Expose metrics from data plane proxies

To expose metrics from every proxy in the mesh, configure the Mesh resource:

  1. apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
  2. kind: Mesh
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: default
  5. spec:
  6.   metrics:
  7.     enabledBackend: prometheus-1
  8.     backends:
  9.     - name: prometheus-1
  10.       type: prometheus

which is a convenient shortcut for

  1. apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
  2. kind: Mesh
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: default
  5. spec:
  6.   metrics:
  7.     enabledBackend: prometheus-1
  8.     backends:
  9.     - name: prometheus-1
  10.       type: prometheus
  11.       conf:
  12.         skipMTLS: false
  13.         port: 5670
  14.         path: /metrics
  15.         tags: # tags that can be referred in Traffic Permission when metrics are secured by mTLS  
  16.           kuma.io/service: dataplane-metrics
  1. type: Mesh
  2. name: default
  3. metrics:
  4.   enabledBackend: prometheus-1
  5.   backends:
  6.   - name: prometheus-1
  7.     type: prometheus
  8.     conf:
  9.       skipMTLS: true # by default mTLS metrics are also protected by mTLS. Scraping metrics with mTLS without transparent proxy is not supported at the moment.

which is a convenient shortcut for

  1. type: Mesh
  2. name: default
  3. metrics:
  4.   enabledBackend: prometheus-1
  5.   backends:
  6.   - name: prometheus-1
  7.     type: prometheus
  8.     conf:
  9.       skipMTLS: true
  10.       port: 5670
  11.       path: /metrics
  12.       tags: # tags that can be referred in Traffic Permission when metrics are secured by mTLS  
  13.         kuma.io/service: dataplane-metrics

This tells Kuma to configure every proxy in the default mesh to expose an HTTP endpoint with Prometheus metrics on port 5670 and URI path /metrics.

The metrics endpoint is forwarded to the standard Envoy Prometheus metrics endpointTraffic Metrics - 图1 (opens new window) and supports the same query parameters. You can pass the filter query parameter to limit the results to metrics whose names match a given regular expression. By default all available metrics are returned.

Override Prometheus settings per data plane proxy

To override Mesh-wide defaults for a particular Pod, use Kuma-specific annotations:

  • prometheus.metrics.kuma.io/port - to override Mesh-wide default port
  • prometheus.metrics.kuma.io/path - to override Mesh-wide default path

For example:

  1. apiVersion: apps/v1
  2. kind: Deployment
  3. metadata:
  4.   namespace: kuma-example
  5.   name: kuma-tcp-echo
  6. spec:
  7.   ...
  8.   template:
  9.     metadata:
  10.       ...
  11.       annotations:
  12.         prometheus.metrics.kuma.io/port: "1234"               # override Mesh-wide default port
  13.         prometheus.metrics.kuma.io/path: "/non-standard-path" # override Mesh-wide default path
  14.     spec:
  15.       containers:
  16.       ...

Proxies for this Pod expose an HTTP endpoint with Prometheus metrics on port 1234 and URI path /non-standard-path.

To override Mesh-wide defaults on a particular machine, configure the Dataplane resource:

  1. type: Dataplane
  2. mesh: default
  3. name: example
  4. metrics:
  5.   type: prometheus
  6.   conf:
  7.     skipMTLS: true
  8.     port: 1234
  9.     path: /non-standard-path

This proxy exposes an HTTP endpoint with Prometheus metrics on port 1234 and URI path /non-standard-path.

Configure Prometheus

Although proxy metrics are now exposed, you still need to let Prometheus discover them.

In Prometheus version 2.29 and later, you can add Kuma metrics to your prometheus.yml:

  1. scrape_configs:
  2.     - job_name: 'kuma-dataplanes'
  3.       scrape_interval: "5s"
  4.       kuma_sd_configs:
  5.       - server: "http://kuma-control-plane.kuma-system.svc:5676"

For more information, see the Prometheus documentationTraffic Metrics - 图2 (opens new window).

For earlier versions of Prometheus, Kuma provides the kuma-prometheus-sd tool, which runs alongside your Prometheus instance. This tool fetches a list of current data plane proxies from the Kuma control plane and saves the list in Prometheus-compatible format to a file on disk. Prometheus watches for changes to the file and updates its scraping configuration accordingly.

You can run kumactl install metrics | kubectl apply -f - to deploy configured Prometheus with Grafana.

If you’ve already deployed Prometheus, you can use Prometheus federationTraffic Metrics - 图3 (opens new window) to bring Kuma metrics to your main Prometheus cluster.

  1. Run kuma-prometheus-sd, for example:

    1. kuma-prometheus-sd run \
    2.   --cp-address=grpcs://kuma-control-plane.internal:5676 \
    3.   --output-file=/var/run/kuma-prometheus-sd/kuma.file_sd.json

  2. Configure Prometheus to read from the file you just saved. For example, add the following snippet to prometheus.yml:

    1. scrape_configs:
    2. - job_name: 'kuma-dataplanes'
    3.   scrape_interval: 15s
    4.   file_sd_configs:
    5.   - files:
    6.     - /var/run/kuma-prometheus-sd/kuma.file_sd.json

    then run:

    1. prometheus --config.file=prometheus.yml

Check the Targets page in the Prometheus dashboard. You should see a list of data plane proxies from your mesh. For example:

A screenshot of Targets page on Prometheus UI

Secure data plane proxy metrics

Kuma lets you expose proxy metrics in a secure way by leveraging mTLS. Prometheus needs to be a part of the mesh for this feature to work, which is the default deployment model when kumactl install metrics is used on Kubernetes.

Make sure that mTLS is enabled in the mesh.

  1. apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
  2. kind: Mesh
  3. metadata:
  4.   name: default
  5. spec:
  6.   mtls:
  7.     enabledBackend: ca-1
  8.     backends:
  9.     - name: ca-1
  10.       type: builtin
  11.   metrics:
  12.     enabledBackend: prometheus-1
  13.     backends:
  14.     - name: prometheus-1
  15.       type: prometheus
  16.       conf:
  17.         port: 5670
  18.         path: /metrics
  19.         skipMTLS: false
  20.         tags: # tags that can be referred in Traffic Permission  
  21.           kuma.io/service: dataplane-metrics

Allow the traffic from Grafana to Prometheus Server and from Prometheus Server to data plane proxy metrics and for other Prometheus components:

  1. apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
  2. kind: TrafficPermission
  3. mesh: default
  4. metadata:
  5.   name: metrics-permissions
  6. spec:
  7.   sources:
  8.     - match:
  9.        kuma.io/service: prometheus-server_kuma-metrics_svc_80
  10.   destinations:
  11.     - match:
  12.        kuma.io/service: dataplane-metrics
  13.     - match:
  14.        kuma.io/service: "prometheus-alertmanager_kuma-metrics_svc_80"
  15.     - match:
  16.        kuma.io/service: "prometheus-kube-state-metrics_kuma-metrics_svc_80"
  17.     - match:
  18.        kuma.io/service: "prometheus-kube-state-metrics_kuma-metrics_svc_81"
  19.     - match:
  20.        kuma.io/service: "prometheus-pushgateway_kuma-metrics_svc_9091"
  21. ---
  22. apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
  23. kind: TrafficPermission
  24. mesh: default
  25. metadata:
  26.   name: grafana-to-prometheus
  27. spec:
  28.    sources:
  29.    - match:
  30.       kuma.io/service: "grafana_kuma-metrics_svc_80"
  31.    destinations:
  32.    - match:
  33.       kuma.io/service: "prometheus-server_kuma-metrics_svc_80"

This feature requires transparent proxy, so it’s currently not available for Universal deployments.

Expose metrics from applications

In addition to exposing metrics from the data plane proxies, you might want to expose metrics from applications running next to the proxies.

Use standard prometheus.io annotations on Pod or Service:

  1. apiVersion: apps/v1
  2. kind: Deployment
  3. metadata:
  4.   namespace: kuma-example
  5.   name: kuma-tcp-echo
  6. spec:
  7.   ...
  8.   template:
  9.     metadata:
  10.       ...
  11.       annotations:
  12.         prometheus.io/scrape: "true"
  13.         prometheus.io/port: "1234"
  14.         prometheus.io/path: "/non-standard-path"
  15.     spec:
  16.       containers:
  17.       ...

Use the Discovery Service of your choiceTraffic Metrics - 图5 (opens new window). In the future Kuma will help to expose metrics in more native way.

To consume paths protected by mTLS, you need Traffic Permission that lets Prometheus consume applications.

Grafana Dashboards

Kuma ships with four default dashboards that are available to import from the Grafana Labs repositoryTraffic Metrics - 图6 (opens new window).

Kuma Dataplane

This dashboards lets you investigate the status of a single dataplane in the mesh.

Kuma Dataplane dashboard Kuma Dataplane dashboard Kuma Dataplane dashboard Kuma Dataplane dashboard

Kuma Mesh

This dashboard lets you investigate the aggregated statistics of a single mesh.

Kuma Mesh dashboard

Kuma Service to Service

This dashboard lets you investigate aggregated statistics from dataplanes of given source service to dataplanes of given destination service.

Kuma Service to Service dashboard Kuma Service to Service HTTP

Kuma CP

This dashboard lets you investigate statistics of the control plane.

Kuma CP dashboard Kuma CP dashboard Kuma CP dashboard

Kuma Service

This dashboard lets you investigate aggregated statistics for each service.

Kuma Service dashboard