SUSE Rancher Prime

SUSE Observability

Introduction

SUSE Observability, formerly known as StackState can be used for Observability of your Kubernetes clusters and their workloads.

The installation of SUSE Observability, the SUSE Observability UI extension and the SUSE Observability Agents takes about 30 minutes in total.

Getting help

For support please file a support case in SUSE Customer Center (SCC).

Prerequisites

License key

A license key for SUSE Observability server can be obtained via the SUSE Customer Center and will be shown as "SUSE Rancher Prime - Observability Tech Preview" Registration Code. This license is valid until Oct, 31 2024. Before the end a license will be made available which is valid until the end of your Rancher Prime subscription.

Requirements

To install SUSE Observability, ensure that the nodes have enough CPU and memory capacity. Below are the specific requirements.

There are different installation options available for SUSE Observability. It is possible to install SUSE Observability either in a High-Availability (HA) or single instance (non-HA) setup. The non-HA setup is recommended for testing purposes or small environments. For production environments, it is recommended to install SUSE Observability in a HA setup.

The HA production setup can support up to 250 Nodes (a Node is counted as<= 4 vCPU and <= 16GB Memory) under observation The Non-HA setup can support up to 50 Nodes under observation.

In the near feature we will have more options with lower resource constraints and for smaller + larger setups.

The different components

SUSE Observability Server

This is the on-prem hosted server part of the installation. It contains a set of services to store observability data:

Topology (StackGraph)
Metrics (VictoriaMetrics)
Traces (ClickHouse)
Logs (ElasticSearch)

Next to this, it contains a set of services for all the observability tasks. e.g. Notifications, State management, Monitoring, etc.

SUSE Observability Agent

The lightweight SUSE Observability agent is installed on your downstream worker nodes. It collects and reports metrics, events, traces and logs, and it provides real-time observability and insights, enabling proactive monitoring and troubleshooting of your IT environment.

The SUSE Observability version of the Agent also uses eBPF as a lightweight way to monitor all your workloads and their communication. It also decodes the RED (Rate, Errors and Duration) signals for most of the common L7 protocols like TCP, HTTP, TLS, Redis, etc.

Rancher Prime - Observability UI extension

This is an UI extension to Rancher Manager that integrates the health signals observed by SUSE Observability. It gives direct access to the health of any resource and a link to SUSE Observability's UI for further investigation.

Where to install SUSE Observability server

SUSE Observability server should be installed in its own downstream cluster intended for Observability. See the below picture for reference.

For StackState to be able to work properly it needs:

Kubernetes Persistent Storage to be available in the observability cluster to store metrics, events, etc.
the observability cluster to support a way to expose StackState on an HTTPS URL to Rancher, StackState users and the StackState agent. This can be done via an Ingress configuration using an ingress controller, alternatively a (cloud) loadbalancer for the StackState services could do this too, for more information see the Rancher docs.

Pre-Installation

Before installing the SUSE Observability server a default storage class must be set up in the cluster where the SUSE Observability server will be installed:

For k3s: The local-path storage class of type rancher.io/local-path is created by default.
For EKS, AKS, GKE a storage class is set by default
For RKE2 Node Drivers: No storage class is created by default. You will need to create one before installing SUSE Observability.
RKE1 is not supported to run SUSE Observability server.

Installing SUSE Observability

Good to know

If you created the cluster using Rancher Manager and would like to run the provisioning commands below from a local terminal instead of in the web terminal, just copy or download the kubeconfig from the cluster dashboard, see image below, and paste it (or place the downloaded file) into a file that you can easily find e.g. ~/.kube/config-rancher and set the environment variable KUBECONFIG=$HOME/.kube/config-rancher

After meeting the prerequisites you can proceed with the installation. The installation is NOT YET AVAILABLE from the app store. Instead, you can install SUSE Observability via the kubectl shell of the cluster.

You can now follow the instruction below for a HA or NON-HA setup.

Be aware upgrading or downgrading from HA to NON-HA and visa-versa is not yet supported.

Installing a default HA setup for up to 250 Nodes

Get the helm chart

helm_repo.sh

helm repo add suse-observability https://charts.rancher.com/server-charts/prime/suse-observability
helm repo update

Command to generate helm chart values file:

helm_template.sh

helm template \
    --set license='<licenseKey>' \
    --set baseUrl='<baseURL>' \
    suse-observability-values \
    suse-observability/suse-observability-values > values.yaml

Deploy the SUSE Observability helm chart with the generated values:

helm_deploy.sh

helm upgrade --install \
    --namespace suse-observability \
    --create-namespace \
    --values values.yaml \
    suse-observability \
    suse-observability/suse-observability

Installing a NON-HA setup for up to 50 Nodes

Get the helm chart

helm_repo.sh

helm repo add suse-observability https://charts.rancher.com/server-charts/prime/suse-observability
helm repo update

Command to generate helm chart values file:

helm_template.sh

helm template \
    --set license='<licenseKey>' \
    --set baseUrl='<baseURL>' \
    suse-observability-values \
    suse-observability/suse-observability-values > values.yaml

The baseUrl must be the URL via which SUSE Observability will be accessible to Rancher, users, and the SUSE Observability agent. The URL must including the scheme, for example https://observability.internal.mycompany.com. See also accessing SUSE Observability.

Create a second values file for the non-ha setup, named nonha_values.yaml with the following content:

nonha_values.yaml

# This files defines additional Helm values to run SUSE Observability on a
# non-high availability production setup. Use this file in combination
# with a regular values.yaml file that contains your API key, etc.
elasticsearch:
  minimumMasterNodes: 1
  replicas: 1

hbase:
  deployment:
    mode: "Mono"
  hbase:
    master:
      replicaCount: 1
    regionserver:
      replicaCount: 1
  hdfs:
    datanode:
      replicaCount: 1
    secondarynamenode:
      enabled: false
  tephra:
    replicaCount: 1

kafka:
  replicaCount: 1
  defaultReplicationFactor: 1
  offsetsTopicReplicationFactor: 1
  transactionStateLogReplicationFactor: 1

stackstate:
  components:
    ui:
      replicaCount: 1
  experimental:
    server:
      split: false

victoria-metrics-1:
  enabled: false

zookeeper:
  replicaCount: 1

clickhouse:
  replicaCount: 1

Deploy the SUSE Observability helm chart with the generated values, as well as the non-ha configuration values:

helm_deploy.sh

helm upgrade --install \
    --namespace suse-observability \
    --create-namespace \
    --values values.yaml \
    --values nonha_values.yaml \
    suse-observability \
    suse-observability/suse-observability

Accessing SUSE Observability

The SUSE Observability Helm chart has support for creating an Ingress resource to make SUSE Observability accessible outside of the cluster. Follow these instructions to set that up when you have an ingress controller in the cluster. Make sure that the resulting URL uses TLS with a valid, not self-signed, certificate.

If you prefer to use a load balancer instead of ingress, expose the suse-observability-router service. The URL for the loadbalancer needs to use a valid, not self-signed, TLS certificate.

Installing UI extensions

To install UI extensions, enable the UI extensions from the rancher UI

After enabling UI extensions, follow these steps:

Navigate to extensions on the rancher UI and under the "Available" section of extensions, you will find the Observability extension.
Install the Observability extension.
Once installed, on the left panel of the rancher UI, the SUSE Observability section appears.
Navigate to the SUSE Observability section and select "configurations". In this section, you can add the SUSE Observability server details and connect it.
Follow the instructions as mentioned in Obtain a service token section below and fill in the details.

Obtain a service token:

Log into the SUSE Observability instance.
From the top left corner, select CLI.
Note the API token and install SUSE Observability cli on your local machine.
Create a service token by running

sts service-token create --name suse-observability-extension --roles stackstate-k8s-troubleshooter

Installing the SUSE Observability Agent

In the SUSE Observability UI open the main menu and select StackPacks.
Select the Kubernetes StackPack.
Click on new instance and provide the cluster name of the downstream cluster which you are adding. Make sure you match the name of the Rancher cluster with the name provided here. Click install.
In the list of instructions find the section that matches your cluster best
Execute the instructions provided to install the agent, these can be run in the kubectl shell that you can open for your cluster via the Rancher UI. But it can also be run from a local machine if it has Helm installed and is authorized to connect to the cluster.
After you install the agent, the cluster can be seen within the SUSE Observability UI as well as the SUSE Rancher - Observability UI extension.

Single Sign On

To enable Single sign-on with your own authentication provider please see here.

Frequently asked questions & Observations:

Is it mandatory to install a SUSE Observability agent before proceeding with adding the UI extension?
- No this is not mandatory, the UI extension can be installed independent.
Is it mandatory to install SUSE Observability Server before we proceed with UI extensions?
- Yes this is not mandatory since you need to provide a SUSE Observability endpoint in the configuration
Can we install SUSE Observability on a local cluster or on a downstream cluster?
- Both options are possible.
To monitor the downstream clusters, should we install the SUSE Observability agent from the app store or add a new instance from the SUSE Observability UI?
- Both options are possible depending on users preference.

Open Issues

When you uninstall and reinstall the UI extensions for Observability, we noticed that service token is not deleted and is reused upon reinstallation. Whenever we uninstall the extensions, service token should be removed.
- This information should be deleted when the UI extensions are uninstalled.
After the extensions are installed, the SUSE Observability UI opens in the same tab as the Rancher UI.
- You can use shift-click to open in a new tab, this will become the default behaviour
The SUSE Observability Extension is only supported on 2.8.x versions and not yet on the 2.9.x version.
- Support for 2.9.x will be available soon.
On RKE(1) The Node Agent does not start process-agent with Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS worker nodes it fails with a message failed to create network tracer
Be aware upgrading or downgrading from HA to NON-HA and visa-versa is not yet supported.

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