Monitoring overview

Monitoring overview

About OKD monitoring

OKD includes a preconfigured, preinstalled, and self-updating monitoring stack that provides monitoring for core platform components. You also have the option to enable monitoring for user-defined projects.

A cluster administrator can configure the monitoring stack with the supported configurations. OKD delivers monitoring best practices out of the box.

A set of alerts are included by default that immediately notify cluster administrators about issues with a cluster. Default dashboards in the OKD web console include visual representations of cluster metrics to help you to quickly understand the state of your cluster. With the OKD web console, you can view and manage metrics, alerts, and review monitoring dashboards.

In the Observe section of OKD web console, you can access and manage monitoring features such as metrics, alerts, monitoring dashboards, and metrics targets.

After installing OKD, cluster administrators can optionally enable monitoring for user-defined projects. By using this feature, cluster administrators, developers, and other users can specify how services and pods are monitored in their own projects. As a cluster administrator, you can find answers to common problems such as user metrics unavailability and high consumption of disk space by Prometheus in Troubleshooting monitoring issues.

Understanding the monitoring stack

The OKD monitoring stack is based on the Prometheus open source project and its wider ecosystem. The monitoring stack includes the following:

Default platform monitoring components. A set of platform monitoring components are installed in the openshift-monitoring project by default during an OKD installation. This provides monitoring for core OKD components including Kubernetes services. The default monitoring stack also enables remote health monitoring for clusters. These components are illustrated in the Installed by default section in the following diagram.
Components for monitoring user-defined projects. After optionally enabling monitoring for user-defined projects, additional monitoring components are installed in the openshift-user-workload-monitoring project. This provides monitoring for user-defined projects. These components are illustrated in the User section in the following diagram.

Default monitoring components

By default, the OKD 4.11 monitoring stack includes these components:

Table 1. Default monitoring stack components
Component	Description
Cluster Monitoring Operator	The Cluster Monitoring Operator (CMO) is a central component of the monitoring stack. It deploys and manages Prometheus instances, the Thanos Querier, the Telemeter Client, and metrics targets and ensures that they are up to date. The CMO is deployed by the Cluster Version Operator (CVO).
Prometheus Operator	The Prometheus Operator (PO) in the `openshift-monitoring` project creates, configures, and manages platform Prometheus instances and Alertmanager instances. It also automatically generates monitoring target configurations based on Kubernetes label queries.
Prometheus	Prometheus is the monitoring system on which the OKD monitoring stack is based. Prometheus is a time-series database and a rule evaluation engine for metrics. Prometheus sends alerts to Alertmanager for processing.
Prometheus Adapter	The Prometheus Adapter (PA in the preceding diagram) translates Kubernetes node and pod queries for use in Prometheus. The resource metrics that are translated include CPU and memory utilization metrics. The Prometheus Adapter exposes the cluster resource metrics API for horizontal pod autoscaling. The Prometheus Adapter is also used by the `oc adm top nodes` and `oc adm top pods` commands.
Alertmanager	The Alertmanager service handles alerts received from Prometheus. Alertmanager is also responsible for sending the alerts to external notification systems.
`kube-state-metrics` agent	The `kube-state-metrics` exporter agent (KSM in the preceding diagram) converts Kubernetes objects to metrics that Prometheus can use.
`openshift-state-metrics` agent	The `openshift-state-metrics` exporter (OSM in the preceding diagram) expands upon `kube-state-metrics` by adding metrics for OKD-specific resources.
`node-exporter` agent	The `node-exporter` agent (NE in the preceding diagram) collects metrics about every node in a cluster. The `node-exporter` agent is deployed on every node.
Thanos Querier	The Thanos Querier aggregates and optionally deduplicates core OKD metrics and metrics for user-defined projects under a single, multi-tenant interface.
Telemeter Client	The Telemeter Client sends a subsection of the data from platform Prometheus instances to Red Hat to facilitate Remote Health Monitoring for clusters.

All of the components in the monitoring stack are monitored by the stack and are automatically updated when OKD is updated.

All components of the monitoring stack use the TLS security profile settings that are centrally configured by a cluster administrator. If you configure a monitoring stack component that uses TLS security settings, the component uses the TLS security profile settings that already exist in the tlsSecurityProfile field in the global OKD apiservers.config.openshift.io/cluster resource.

Default monitoring targets

In addition to the components of the stack itself, the default monitoring stack monitors:

CoreDNS
Elasticsearch (if Logging is installed)
etcd
Fluentd (if Logging is installed)
HAProxy
Image registry
Kubelets
Kubernetes API server
Kubernetes controller manager
Kubernetes scheduler
Metering (if Metering is installed)
OpenShift API server
OpenShift Controller Manager
Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM)

Each OKD component is responsible for its monitoring configuration. For problems with the monitoring of an OKD component, open a Jira issue against that component, not against the general monitoring component.

Other OKD framework components might be exposing metrics as well. For details, see their respective documentation.

Components for monitoring user-defined projects

OKD 4.11 includes an optional enhancement to the monitoring stack that enables you to monitor services and pods in user-defined projects. This feature includes the following components:

Table 2. Components for monitoring user-defined projects
Component	Description
Prometheus Operator	The Prometheus Operator (PO) in the `openshift-user-workload-monitoring` project creates, configures, and manages Prometheus and Thanos Ruler instances in the same project.
Prometheus	Prometheus is the monitoring system through which monitoring is provided for user-defined projects. Prometheus sends alerts to Alertmanager for processing.
Thanos Ruler	The Thanos Ruler is a rule evaluation engine for Prometheus that is deployed as a separate process. In OKD 4.11, Thanos Ruler provides rule and alerting evaluation for the monitoring of user-defined projects.
Alertmanager	The Alertmanager service handles alerts received from Prometheus and Thanos Ruler. Alertmanager is also responsible for sending user-defined alerts to external notification systems. Deploying this service is optional.

The components in the preceding table are deployed after monitoring is enabled for user-defined projects.

All of the components in the monitoring stack are monitored by the stack and are automatically updated when OKD is updated.

Monitoring targets for user-defined projects

When monitoring is enabled for user-defined projects, you can monitor:

Metrics provided through service endpoints in user-defined projects.
Pods running in user-defined projects.

Additional resources

Next steps

Configuring the monitoring stack