A million and one metrics to choose from, but what to monitor?
The IT world has been evolving at a rapid pace, and we now have microservices that run inside docker containers on Kubernetes being hosted in public or private clouds. These shifts in technology and platform also introduce new challenges, such as how do you monitor your applications in these environments?
Imagine diving straight into the combined logs of your application for the last hour and trying to find out why a certain part does not respond anymore, without any clear direction or suspicion about what type of problem you are facing. You’re searching for a needle in a haystack and it will be very hard to quickly and methodically find the problem. Furthermore, you might not even find a real problem in the logs of your application. You may be facing infrastructure issues that do not clearly manifest as problems in your application logs. In this article we will introduce you to metric systems that allow you to gather the right metrics in the right place in this new environment. We apply these metric systems specifically to Kubernetes but they are also valid for other platforms.
When you want to know the health of your system two terms are important: Monitoring and Observability.
Monitoring versus observability
Monitoring tells you whether the system works.
Observability lets you ask why it’s not working.- Baron Schwarz
First let’s talk about the difference between monitoring and observability and why we feel it is important to make this distinction. When we talk about monitoring we look at whether our system works. This is done using numerical measures or metrics that can be compared over time and plotted into graphs or tables. Also, alerts can be set on these metrics, so you can be notified when problems start to occur. Examples of these metrics are: number of failed requests per second, percentage of memory usage, average duration of requests, number of requests per second etc. The metrics used for monitoring are usually not very human readable on their own and they are often plotted against time or against another metrics in a graph in order to make sense.
When we talk about observability we look at investigating why the system is not working. An example of this is logging readable messages in a file or another more central logging system. These messages contain details about the behavior of your application and can be very useful when trying to find out what exactly is wrong. There are various levels of logging that can range from fatal errors (your application is crashing) to very verbose messages that help you debug your running application to find out why your application is behaving in a specific way.
Monitoring and observability serve different purposes. Good metrics gathered in the right places will help you monitor your system and pinpoint where a problem is occurring, and it will give you some notion of what type of problem it is. But to answer what exactly is going on you will have to dive deeper and need more detailed information, and this is where observability comes in. When you have found the most likely place a problem is occurring, you can, for example, start diving into the logging and then into the suspicious application or suspect part of the application to figure this out. In the remainder of this article we will only talk about what metrics to use for monitoring, since observability is an entirely separate topic.
What metrics to use?
There are a million and one metrics that can be collected, but trying to monitor a lot of different metrics is confusing and does not help you to quickly find out what is wrong. Luckily, we do not have to reinvent the wheel, as there are already several sets of metrics available for both applications and infrastructure. In this article we will look at the two most well known in these areas: the four golden signals and USE.
Four Golden Signals
The most well-known way of logging metrics are the Four Golden Signals. Google has described this in the book Site Reliability Engineering, which can be read online for free:
Google describes four kinds of metrics to monitor user-facing systems in their book. When the following four golden signals are measured, and a human is being paged in case of problematic signals, the service is decently monitored.
The four golden signals are:
- Latency : the time it takes to service a request.
- Traffic: a measure of how much demand is being placed on your system (e.g. http requests per second)
- Errors: the rate of requests that fail
- Saturation: the part of the system which is most constrained.
These signals are suitable for monitoring your application or microservice, if you like. They don’t monitor the CPU, Disk or Memory (it’s hard to define how to monitor the traffic of a CPU for example). For this reason, we also need to monitor our infrastructure. For infrastructure a practice named USE is also available.
RED method
Tom Wilkie coined the RED method which is based on the Four Golden Signals without saturation. Wilkie believes saturation as it is used in the Four Golden Signals is for more advanced use cases and suggests to focus on the other three metrics first. https://www.weave.works/blog/the-red-method-key-metrics-for-microservices-architecture/
The Prometheus configuration and Grafana dashboards for the RED method are made available by Tom Wilkie on this github repository, which can be found here: https://github.com/kubernetes-monitoring/kubernetes-mixin
USE
When we look at the infrastructure, we can use the “USE metrics” to monitor the resources. USE was conceived by Brendan Gregg in his blogpost “The USE method” (http://www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html). USE is a method to monitor resources such as CPU, Memory and Disk. USE is an abbreviation and stands for:
- Utilization: the average amount of time the resource was busy performing work – this tells us how busy the resource is.
- Saturation: the degree to which the resource has extra work it cannot perform directly. Often this work is queued. One hundred percent saturation means the resource is servicing the exact amount of work it can handle, so no queuing occurs yet.
- Errors: the number of errors that occur
If you apply both the Four Golden Signals and USE metrics to your infrastructure and application stack, you have a decent visibility of the health of both your infrastructure and your application.
About errors
You may need to filter or separate some of the metrics out, depending on the type of errors that occur. For example, if your service returns many Bad Request (400) responses, your average duration might be very short, as Bad Request usually means the caller did not send the right information, so the response is sent almost instantly. So, you might want to exclude Bad Requests responses from your duration metric. Also, you may want to consider whether a Bad Request is really an error. In most cases it means the caller did not send the right information so it is not really an error in your application.
Depending in your situation these metrics may require some finetuning.
Next, we will look at how to apply these concepts to Kubernetes.
Four golden signals and USE on Kubernetes
Three different levels can be identified when monitoring an application that runs on Kubernetes. In Kubernetes your application runs inside a pod which runs on a node. So, we can look at these three levels. First, the node itself. If a node is experiencing issues, you may see issues in your pods as well. Next, we can look at the pod itself. If the pod is experiencing issues, you may also see issues in your application. Lastly, we can look at the application itself. The underlying infrastructure (node and pod) may be healthy, but your application can still have issues that are unrelated to the infrastructure. The following image illustrates how these three levels are related. A pod runs on a node and an application runs “on” a pod.
The following picture illustrates these dependencies. When a lower level is unhealthy, you are likely to see issues in the levels above as well. So when we are monitoring our systems we take a look first at the lowest level, and if that level is healthy we move up to the next level. This way gives you a structured approach to pinpoint which level is having issues.
We can treat the nodes and pods as infrastructure and thus apply the USE metrics to these levels. And for the application we can use the Four Golden Signals. For infrastructure we need to go one level deeper, and we need to define what resources to monitor with the USE metrics. For nodes and pods we can look at the following resources: CPU, memory and disk. We apply the USE metrics to each of these resources.
The following diagram illustrates the various levels of monitoring and the resources and metrics that should be gathered when we apply the USE method and the Four Golden Signals:
How to gather these metrics on Kubernetes
The aim is to be able to gather various sets of metrics on three levels of our application. The de facto standard for gathering this type of information on Kubernetes is Prometheus, combined with Grafana for dashboards. With Prometheus we can scrape metrics from different endpoints. To gather metrics about the nodes, pods and application we will have to expose Prometheus-compatible endpoints for all of this.
CNCF graduates
Both Kubernetes and Prometheus are part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). At the moment of writing this article, both CNCF projects have reached the graduated stage. See https://www.cncf.io/projects/
To expose metrics for the nodes we can use the node exporter that is part of kube-prometheus. This is an application that you run in a pod on each node as a daemon set. It will expose metrics about your node through a Prometheus-compatible endpoint.
To expose metrics for the pods we can use CAdvisor. CAdvisor is part of your Kubernetes cluster by default and exposes metrics about your pods through a Prometheus-compatible metrics endpoint. You don’t have to run any additional pods for these metrics.
To expose metrics for the application, the application itself will have to expose these metrics through a Prometheus-compatible endpoint. For .NET applications a good library to expose metrics to Prometheus is AppMetrics (https://github.com/AppMetrics/AppMetrics).
The following image shows how these parts work together to make metrics available
To get started quickly, you can use the Prometheus operator combined with kube-prometheus to set up Prometheus, Grafana and a set of default metrics and dashboards. Both can be found in this repository on github: https://github.com/coreos/prometheus-operator and are available as Helm charts that you can install into your cluster.
Summary
There are many metrics that can be gathered from infrastructure and applications. Luckily there are already several metrics systems available that can help you to collect the right metrics in the right place. In Kubernetes we can gather metrics on different levels: node, pod and application. You treat node and pod as infrastructure and apply the USE metrics to these. For the application, you can use the Four Golden Signals. You can use Prometheus and Grafana to gather and visualize these metrics.
When you apply these metrics to your application in Kubernetes, you have a solid foundation for monitoring.
This article is part of XPRT. magazine #7.
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