Prometheus remote_write
StackState Kubernetes Troubleshooting
When you have your own on-premise or self-hosted Prometheus running where metrics for your environment are aggregated, you can mirror these metrics in StackState. This will allow you to use StackState's powerful topology and correlation features to troubleshoot your Kubernetes environment without having to switch between tools.
To make this possible, StackState exposes the Prometheus remote_write protocol as an endpoint. Using this endpoint you can configure your Prometheus instance to send metrics to StackState. The metrics are then automatically ingested, and it will be possible to bind the metrics to the components observed by StackState. The following diagram shows how this works:
Prerequisites
To mirror your Prometheus metrics in StackState, you need to lookup the API Key that's used to send in metrics into StackState. The API Key can be found in the description of the installed Kubernetes StackPack in StackState. The following steps show how to find the API Key:
Open the StackState UI and navigate to the StackPacks page
Find the Kubernetes StackPack and click on it.
In the description of the StackPack, you will find the API Key that's used to send in metrics into StackState.
Configuring your Prometheus instance
To configure your Prometheus instance to send metrics to StackState, you need to add a new remote write endpoint to your Prometheus configuration. This can be done by updating the remote_write section in your prometheus.yml file. There are 2 variants that you can use for the authentication to the endpoint, either through a header or through basic authentication.
Header authentication
You can authenticate using the API Key by adding the sts-api-key header to the prometheus remote_write requests. The following example shows how to configure this:
Basic authentication
You can authenticate using basic authentication by adding the basic_auth section to the prometheus remote_write requests. Because the requests to this API are made from a headless service, the username field is set to the static value apikey. The following example shows how to configure this:
Finishing up
After the configuration changes have been applied to the Prometheus configuration file, Prometheus needs to be restarted. After the restart, Prometheus will start sending metrics to StackState. The metrics will be automatically correlated with the rest of your environment and will be visible in the StackState UI.
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