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.

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

Wavefront Operator for Kubernetes 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

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
```

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

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.

(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.

See Bring Your Own Logs Shipper for an overview of how to use the operator with your own logs shipper.

Deploy the Wavefront Collector and Proxy with your configuration
```
kubectl apply -f <path_to_your_wavefront.yaml>
```

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.

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

Bring Your Own Logs Shipper

The operator deploys a data export component (wavefront-proxy) which can recieve log data and relay it to wavefront. You will need to configure your logs shipper to send logs to the data export component (wavefront-proxy) deployed by the operator.

Here is a Wavefront Custom Resource example config for this scenario.

In order to make the best use of your logging solution on kubernetes, we recommend having the below kubernetes log attributes

Log attribute key	Description
`cluster`	The kubernetes cluster name
`pod_name`	The pod name
`container_name`	The container name
`namespace_name`	The namespace name
`pod_id`	The pod id
`container_id`	The container id

In addition to these, here are some general log attributes to configure your logs shipper based on your use case.

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

# Packages

# README

Initial Availability Notice