16th May 2020

vROPs Dashboards – Kubernetes Namespaces

***Dashboard now available on VMware Code and GitHub***

A few weeks ago I installed the vROPs management pack for container monitoring, which provides a great overview of the kubernetes cluster, nodes and pods in the environment.

This dashboard is built from the context of the containers world adaptor and is pulling information from the kubernetes estate using cAdvisor. As mentioned above the default dashboard views are built around the cluster, node and pod objects.

Namespace, Tanzu or Node dashboard

I wanted to see what other dashboards could be pulled together to represent the kubernetes environment, and decided to base the dashboard from the namespace and branch from there.

The dashboard above is built from four widgets, an ‘Object List’, ‘Object Relationship Advanced’, ‘Container Details’ and ‘Top Alerts’. The aim is to provide a quick method to flick between namespaces, nodes or Tanzu clusters either from the list or drilling into items on the object relationship widget and display alerts, errors and health.

The data for the dashboard is linked through the object list widget and flows through the other widgets in the dashboard.

Input data for the object list is collected from objects linked to the Kuberenetes Adapter Instance and the vCenter Server adapters. The input Transformation is edited to a different depth, by default this is 1 and no objects will be returned.

The output filter is configured with a basic filter on object type, the dashboard is for Namespaces, nodes and Tanzu clusters so that’s the filter. There are two different namespace objects referenced here ‘Kuberentes Namespace’ which is getting information from the kuberentes adaptor and the ‘Namespace’ which is coming from the vCenter adaptor and will return objects namespaces created directly on the supervisor cluster (image registry, Tanzu Cluster namespaces).

As you would expect other options are available, for this dashboard selected are ‘Kubernetes Namespace, Kubernetes Node, Namespace and Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster’. By using the object type as the filter the dashboard will update with newly created objects.

Note: After publishing I gave this some thought and edited the dashboard to just present ‘Namespace and Kubernetes Namespace’. The pre configured dashboards provide a great overview of cluster and node.

The only other non default configuration is the parent and children depth within object relationship which are set at 2. The display two relationships either side of the selected object.

Using the dashboard

Select an object from the object list to get started. The relationship is automatically mapped out and the alerts and container details widgets are also automatically populated. As you explore the object relationship widget, information within the alerts and container details widgets update depending on your focus. Elements on the object relationship widget can also be double clicked to redraw the map in that new context.

In the example below I’ve selected the namespace ‘vmware-system-registry…’ through the vCenter adaptor and can see linked errors and details for the pods in the namespace.

In this next example I’ve selected the ‘tkg-wordpress’ namespace object and changed focus to the kubernetes service ‘languid-yoke-wordpress’, which then shows alerts and container details for the in focus object.

The container details tab is interactive, in that when the listed objects are clicked upon you are taken to the environment view for those objects, where even more in depth information is presented along with suggested fixes.

Of course from here the workbench can also be launched to assist in any troubleshooting and symptom correlation.

Hopefully this is useful to someone.

Thanks

Simon