Initial Availability Notice

This project is in the initial availability phase. It is suitable for production usage.

Important: Observability Logs (Beta) is enabled only for selected customers. If you’d like to participate, contact your Observability account representative.

Overview of Wavefront Operator for Kubernetes

The Wavefront Operator for Kubernetes supports deploying the Wavefront Collector and the Wavefront Proxy in Kubernetes. This operator is based on kubebuilder SDK.

Quick Reference

• Operator Installation
• Operator Configuration
• Operator Upgrade
• Operator Downgrade
• Operator Removal

Why use the Wavefront Operator for Kubernetes?

The operator simplifies operational aspects of managing the Wavefront integration. Here are some examples, with more to come!

• Enhanced status reporting of the Wavefront integration so that users can ensure their cluster and Kubernetes resources are reporting data.
• Kubernetes Operator features provide a declarative mechanism for deploying the Wavefront Collector and proxy in a Kubernetes environment.
• Centralized configuration.
• Enhanced configuration validation to surface what needs to be corrected in order to deploy successfully.
• Efficient Kubernetes resource usage supports scaling out the cluster (leader) node and worker nodes independently.

Note: The Collector that is deployed by the Operator still supports configuration via configmap. For example, Istio and MySQL metrics, Telegraf configuration, etc. are still supported.

Architecture

Installation

Note: The Wavefront Operator for Kubernetes helm chart has been deprecated and is no longer supported. Use the deploy, upgrade and removal instructions below instead.

Prerequisites

The following tools are required for installing the integration.

• kubectl

Deploy the Wavefront Collector and Proxy with the Operator

1. Install the Wavefront Operator into observability-system namespace.

   Note: If you already have Wavefront installed via helm or manual deploy, uninstall before you install the operator.

   kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wavefrontHQ/wavefront-operator-for-kubernetes/main/deploy/kubernetes/wavefront-operator.yaml
   

2. Create a Kubernetes secret with your Wavefront token. See Managing API Tokens page.

   kubectl create -n observability-system secret generic wavefront-secret --from-literal token=YOUR_WAVEFRONT_TOKEN
   

3. Create a wavefront.yaml file with your Wavefront Custom Resource configuration. The simplest configuration is:

   # Need to change YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME and YOUR_WAVEFRONT_URL
   apiVersion: wavefront.com/v1alpha1
   kind: Wavefront
   metadata:
     name: wavefront
     namespace: observability-system
   spec:
     clusterName: YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME
     wavefrontUrl: YOUR_WAVEFRONT_URL
     dataCollection:
       metrics:
         enable: true
     dataExport:
       wavefrontProxy:
         enable: true

   See the Configuration section below for details.

4. (Logging Beta) Optionally add the configuration for logging to the wavefront.yaml file. For example:

   # Need to change YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME, YOUR_WAVEFRONT_URL accordingly
   apiVersion: wavefront.com/v1alpha1
   kind: Wavefront
   metadata:
     name: wavefront
     namespace: observability-system
   spec:
     clusterName: YOUR_CLUSTER_NAME
     wavefrontUrl: YOUR_WAVEFRONT_URL
     dataCollection:
       metrics:
         enable: true
       logging:
         enable: true
     dataExport:
       wavefrontProxy:
         enable: true

   See Logs Overview (Beta) for an overview and some links to more doc about the logging beta.

5. Deploy the Wavefront Collector and Proxy with your configuration

   kubectl apply -f <path_to_your_wavefront.yaml>
   

6. Run the following command to get status for the Wavefront integration:

   kubectl get wavefront -n observability-system
   

   The command should return a table like the following, displaying Operator instance health:

   NAME        STATUS    PROXY           CLUSTER-COLLECTOR   NODE-COLLECTOR   LOGGING        AGE    MESSAGE
   wavefront   Healthy   Running (1/1)   Running (1/1)       Running (3/3)    Running (3/3)  2m4s   All components are healthy
   

   If STATUS is Unhealthy, check troubleshooting.

Note: For details on migrating from existing helm chart or manual deploy, see Migration.

Configuration

You configure the Wavefront Operator with a custom resource file.

When you update the resource file, the Operator picks up the changes and updates the integration deployment accordingly.

To update the custom resource file:

• Open the custom resource file for edit.
• Change one or more options and save the file.
• Run kubectl apply -f <path_to_your_config_file.yaml>.

See below for configuration options.

We have templates for common scenarios. See the comments in each file for usage instructions.

• Using an existing collector ConfigMap
• With plugin configuration in a secret
• Filtering metrics upon collection
• Defining Kubernetes resource limits
• Defining data collection pod tolerations
• Defining proxy pre-processor rules
• Enabling proxy histogram support
• Enabling proxy tracing support
• Using an HTTP Proxy
• Getting started with logging configuration
• Full logging configuration

You can see all configuration options in the wavefront-full-config.yaml.

Upgrade

Upgrade the Wavefront Operator (both Collector and Proxy) to a new version by running the following command :

kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wavefrontHQ/wavefront-operator-for-kubernetes/main/deploy/kubernetes/wavefront-operator.yaml

Note: This command will not upgrade any existing wavefront/wavefront helm installation. See migration.md for migration instructions.

Downgrade

Go to Releases, and find the previous release version number, for example v2.0.3. Use this value to replace PREVIOUS_VERSION in the following command:

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/wavefrontHQ/wavefront-operator-for-kubernetes/releases/download/PREVIOUS_VERSION/wavefront-operator.yaml

Removal

To remove the Wavefront Integration from your environment, run the following commands:

kubectl delete -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wavefrontHQ/wavefront-operator-for-kubernetes/main/deploy/kubernetes/wavefront-operator.yaml

Contribution

See the Contribution page