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Kubernetes

This page describes StackState v4.4.x.

The StackState 4.4 version range is End of Life (EOL) and no longer supported. We encourage customers still running the 4.4 version range to upgrade to a more recent release.

Go to the documentation for the latest StackState release.

Overview

StackState Agent V2

To retrieve topology, events and metrics data from a Kubernetes cluster, you will need to have the following installed in the cluster:

  • StackState Agent V2 on each node in the cluster

  • StackState Cluster Agent on one node

  • kube-state-metrics

To integrate with other services, a separate instance of the StackState Agent should be deployed on a standalone VM.

StackState Agents

The Kubernetes integration collects topology data in a Kubernetes cluster, as well as metrics and events. To achieve this, different types of StackState Agent are used:

ComponentRequired?Pod name

StackState Cluster Agent

✅

stackstate-cluster-agent

StackState Agent

✅

stackstate-cluster-agent-agent

StackState ClusterCheck Agent

-

stackstate-cluster-agent-clusterchecks

To integrate with other services, a separate instance of the StackState Agent should be deployed on a standalone VM. It is not currently possible to configure a StackState Agent deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with checks that integrate with other services.

StackState Cluster Agent

StackState Cluster Agent is deployed as a Deployment. There is one instance for the entire cluster:

  • Topology and events data for all resources in the cluster are retrieved from the Kubernetes API

  • Control plane metrics are retrieved from the Kubernetes API

When cluster checks are enabled, cluster checks configured here are run by one of the deployed StackState ClusterCheck Agent pods.

StackState Agent

StackState Agent V2 is deployed as a DaemonSet with one instance on each node in the cluster:

  • Host information is retrieved from the Kubernetes API.

  • Container information is collected from the Docker daemon.

  • Metrics are retrieved from kubelet running on the node and also from kube-state-metrics if this is deployed on the same node.

By default, metrics are also retrieved from kube-state-metrics if that is deployed on the same node as the StackState Agent pod. This can cause issues on a large Kubernetes cluster. To avoid this, it is advisable to enable cluster checks so that metrics are gathered from kube-state-metrics by a dedicated StackState ClusterCheck Agent.

StackState ClusterCheck Agent

Deployed only when clusterChecks.enabled is set to true in values.yaml when the StackState Cluster Agent is deployed. When deployed, default is one instance per cluster. When enabled, cluster checks configured on the StackState Cluster Agent are run by one of the deployed StackState ClusterCheck Agent pods. This is useful to run checks that do not need to run on a specific node and monitor non-containerized workloads such as:

  • Out-of-cluster datastores and endpoints (for example, RDS or CloudSQL).

  • Load-balanced cluster services (for example, Kubernetes services).

Read how to enable cluster checks.

Setup

Supported versions

StackState Agent V2 is supported to run on Kubernetes 1.15 or higher.

StackState Receiver API address

StackState Agent connects to the StackState Receiver API.

For StackState running on Kubernetes, the Receiver API is hosted by default at:

https://<baseUrl>/receiver/stsAgent

The baseUrl is set during StackState installation, for details see Kubernetes install - configuration parameters.

Install

The StackState Agent, Cluster Agent and kube-state-metrics can be installed together using the Cluster Agent Helm Chart:

  1. If you do not already have it, you will need to add the StackState helm repository to the local helm client:

     helm repo add stackstate https://helm.stackstate.io
 helm repo update

  2. Deploy the StackState Agent, Cluster Agent and kube-state-metrics with the helm command provided in the StackState UI after you have installed the StackPack. For large Kubernetes clusters, you can enable cluster checks to run the kubernetes_state check in a StackState ClusterCheck Agent pod.

stackstate.cluster.authToken

In addition to the variables included in the provided helm command, it is also recommended to provide a stackstate.cluster.authToken. This is an optional variable, however, if not provided a new, random value will be generated each time a helm upgrade is performed. This could leave some pods in the cluster with an incorrect configuration.

For example:

helm upgrade --install \
--namespace stackstate \
--create-namespace \
--set-string 'stackstate.apiKey=<your-api-key>' \
--set-string 'stackstate.cluster.name=<your-cluster-name>' \
--set-string 'stackstate.cluster.authToken=<your-cluster-token>' \
--set-string 'stackstate.url=<stackstate-receiver-api-address>' \
stackstate-cluster-agent stackstate/cluster-agent

Full details of the available values can be found in the Cluster Agent Helm Chart documentation (github.com).

Upgrade

To upgrade the Agents running in your Kubernetes cluster, run the helm upgrade command provided on the StackState UI StackPacks > Integrations > Kubernetes screen. This is the same command used to deploy the StackState Agent and Cluster Agent.

Configure

Cluster check configuration

Optionally, the chart can be configured to start additional StackState Agent V2 pods (1 by default) as StackState ClusterCheck Agent pods that run cluster checks. Cluster checks are configured on the StackState Cluster Agent are run by one of the deployed StackState ClusterCheck Agent pods.

Enable cluster checks

To enable cluster checks and the cluster check Agent pods, create a values.yaml file to deploy the cluster-agent Helm chart and add the following YAML segment:

clusterChecks:
  enabled: true

Run the Kubernetes_state check as a cluster check

The kubernetes_state check is responsible for gathering metrics from kube-state-metrics and sending them to StackState. It is configured on the StackState Cluster Agent and runs in the StackState Agent pod that is on the same node as the kube-state-metrics pod.

In a default deployment, the pod running the StackState Cluster Agent and every deployed StackState Agent need to be able to run the check. In a large Kubernetes cluster, this can consume a lot of memory as every pod must be configured with sufficient CPU and memory requests and limits. Since only one of those Agent pods will actually run the check, a lot of CPU and memory resources will be allocated, but will not be used.

To remedy that situation, the kubernetes_state check can be configured to run as a cluster check. The YAML segment below shows how to do that in the values.yaml file used to deploy the cluster-agent chart:

clusterChecks:
# clusterChecks.enabled -- Enables the cluster checks functionality _and_ the clustercheck pods.
  enabled: true
agent:
  config:
    override:
# agent.config.override -- Disables kubernetes_state check on regular agent pods.
    - name: auto_conf.yaml
      path: /etc/stackstate-agent/conf.d/kubernetes_state.d
      data: |
clusterAgent:
  config:
    override:
# clusterAgent.config.override -- Defines kubernetes_state check for clusterchecks agents. Auto-discovery
#                                 with ad_identifiers does not work here. Use a specific URL instead.
    - name: conf.yaml
      path: /etc/stackstate-agent/conf.d/kubernetes_state.d
      data: |
        cluster_check: true

        init_config:

        instances:
          - kube_state_url: http://YOUR_KUBE_STATE_METRICS_SERVICE_NAME:8080/metrics

Advanced Agent configuration

StackState Agent V2 can be configured to tune the process blacklist, or turn off specific features when not needed. The required environment variables and are described on the page advanced Agent configuration.

Integration configuration

To integrate with other external services, a separate instance of the StackState Agent should be deployed on a standalone VM. It is not currently possible to configure a StackState Agent deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with checks that integrate with other services.

Commands

Status and information

To check the status of the Kubernetes integration, check that the StackState Cluster Agent (cluster-agent) pod and all of the StackState Agent (cluster-agent-agent) pods have status READY.

❯ kubectl get deployment,daemonset --namespace stackstate

NAME                                                 READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
deployment.apps/stackstate-cluster-agent             1/1     1            1           5h14m
NAME                                                 DESIRED   CURRENT   READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   NODE SELECTOR   AGE
daemonset.apps/stackstate-cluster-agent-agent        10        10        10      10           10          <none>          5h14m

Uninstall

To uninstall the StackState Cluster Agent and the StackState Agent from your Kubernetes cluster, run a Helm uninstall:

helm uninstall <release_name> --namespace <namespace>

# If you used the standard install command provided when you installed the StackPack
helm uninstall stackstate-cluster-agent --namespace stackstate

See also

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