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Prometheus BOSH release on Pivotal Cloud Foundry

This is currently work in progress. Key changes I'm working on:

• use manifests from prometheus-boshrelease (with the required modifications)
• switch to bosh-deployment resource
• switch everything to BOSH CLI v2
• make sure it works perfectly on PCF 1.12 (I'm not testing with older versions)
• use named runtime config (name=node_exporter)

How it works

This is a high-level overview of monitoring Cloud Foundry with Prometheus

Notes:

• since Prometheus uses a pull mechanism, connections are initiated by Prometheus
• if you deploy the bosh release using the provided manifest, exporters are colocated with Prometheus (except node_exporter which is a BOSH add-on and runs on all VMs) NOTE: of course you can create your own manifest or an ops file to deploy jobs in a different way
• prometheus-boshrelease includes a number of other exporters you can use which are not used in this example; you can see them here

Installation

It is recommended to use the pipeline to deploy Prometheus (or anything else for that matter). To do that:

• clone this repository
• copy params.yml to a different place
• edit the params accordingly (there are helpful comments)
• fly -t target set-pipeline -p deploy-prometheus -c pipeline/pipeline.yml -l your-params.yml
• unpause the pipeline
• trigger create-uaa-clients job manually

Manual installation

Please use the pipeline above if you can. If you do, you don't have to read any further.

Create UAA clients

If you are using the pipeline, UAA clients are created automatically so you don't need to do this.

Key components of this BOSH release are firehose_exporter, bosh_exporter and cf_exporter which retrieve the data (from CF firehose, BOSH director and Cloud Controller API respectively) and present it in the Prometheus format. Each of those exporters require credentials to access the data source. IMPORTANT: these users have to be created in two different UAA instances. For the firehose and CF credentials, you use the main UAA instance of a Cloud Foundry deployment (where you would normally create users/clients, such as those for any other nozzles). For bosh_exporter however, you need to use the UAA which is colocated with the BOSH Director.

Create clients for firehose_exporter and cf_exporter

This process is explained here: https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/firehose_exporter

uaac target https://uaa.SYSTEM_DOMAIN --skip-ssl-validation
uaac token client get admin -s <YOUR ADMIN CLIENT SECRET>
uaac client add firehose_exporter \
  --name firehose_exporter \
  --secret prometheus-client-secret \
  --authorized_grant_types client_credentials,refresh_token \
  --authorities doppler.firehose

uaac client add cf_exporter \
  --name cf_exporter \
  --secret prometheus-cf-client-secret \
  --authorized_grant_types client_credentials,refresh_token \
  --authorities cloud_controller.admin

Edit name and secret values. You will need to put them in the manifest later.

Create client for bosh_exporter

uaac target https://BOSH_DIRECTOR:8443 --skip-ssl-validation
uaac token owner get login -s Uaa-Login-Client-Credentials
User name:  admin
Password:  Uaa-Admin-User-Credentials
  uaac client add bosh_exporter \
  --name bosh_exporter \
  --secret prometheus-client-secret \
  --authorized_grant_types client_credentials,refresh_token \
  --authorities bosh.read \
  --scope bosh.read

Edit name and secret values. You will need to put them in the manifest later.

Create MySQL user

Given that PCF uses MySQL internally you should also monitor it. To do that, create a MySQL user and configure it in local.yml later.

bosh ssh mysql
mysql -u root -p
Enter password: (OpsManager -> ERT -> Credentials -> Mysql Admin Credentials)
CREATE USER 'exporter' IDENTIFIED BY 'CHANGE_ME';
GRANT PROCESS, REPLICATION CLIENT, SELECT ON *.* TO 'exporter' WITH MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 3;

More information about mysqld_exporter is available here.

Deploy node_exporter on all nodes

node_exporter is a core Prometheus exporter which provides detailed OS-level information. Using BOSH add-ons feature it's very easy to install node_exporter on all BOSH-provisioned VMs. Take the example runtime.yml (adjust the prometheus release version if needed) and run:

bosh update-runtime-config runtime.yml

Once that's done, any VM (re)created by BOSH will be running node_exporter. The manifest is already prepared to consume that data.

Connect to Grafana

If the deployment was successful use bosh vms to find out the IP address of your nginx server. Then connect:

• https://NGINX:3000 to access Grafana
• https://NGINX:9090 to access Prometheus

There is a number of ready to use Dashboards that should install automatically. You can edit them in Grafana or create your own. They are coming from prometheus-boshrelease/jobs.

Alertmanager

The prometheus-boshrelease does include some predefined alerts for CloudFoundry as well as for BOSH. You can find the alert definitions in prometheus-boshrelease/job. Check the *.alerts rule files in the corresponding folders. If you create new alerts make sure to add them to the prometheus.yml - the path to the alert rule file as well as a job release for additional new exporters. Access the AlertManager to see active alerts or silence them:

• https://NGINX:9093

All configured rules as well as their current state can be viewed by accessing Prometheus:

• https://NGINX:9090/alerts

Below and example config for prometheus.yml to send alerts to slack:

- name: alertmanager
    release: prometheus
    properties:
      alertmanager:
        receivers:
          - name: default-receiver
            slack_configs:
            - api_url: https://hooks.slack.com/services/....
              channel: 'slack-channel'
              send_resolved: true
              pretext: "text before the actual alert message"
              text: "{{ .CommonAnnotations.description }}"
        route:
          receiver: default-receiver

To check your AlertManager configuration you can execute:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '[{"labels":{"alertname":"TestAlert1"}}]' <alertmanager>:9093/api/v1/alerts

This should trigger a test alert.