Container Data Collection Prerequisites

Data Collection Prerequisites

#410

Data Collection from an In-Cluster Prometheus Deployment

You can quickly deploy the data forwarder and all of the required prerequisite software using a Helm chart. See Kubex Automation Stack Helm Chart.

Data Collection from Other Configurations

If you using another configuration, the following software is required for Kubex container data collection and optimization.

The data forwarder is only supported on Linux OS and x64 architecture.

  1. Densify account—Contact Densify for details of your subscription or sign up for a free trial.
  2. Kubernetes or OpenShift must be deployed.
    • Running cAdvisor as part of the kubelet provides the workload and configuration data required by Densify.
  3. kube-state-metrics—This service monitors the Kubernetes API server and generates metrics from the various objects inside the individual Kubernetes components. This service provides orchestration and cluster level metrics such as deployments, pod metrics, resource reservation, etc. The collected metrics allow Kubex to get a complete picture of how your containers are setup i.e. Replica Sets, Deployments, Pod and Container Labels.
  4. Prometheus or supported observability platform—Collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals. It provides the monitoring/data aggregation layer. It must be deployed and configured to collect kube-state-metrics and cAdvisor/kubelet metrics. See Using an Observability Platform when using an observability platform.

    5. When deploying Prometheus and kube-state-metrics using a standard operator, some of the metrics that Densify needs for analysis may be excluded (i.e. on a deny list). Refer to Prometheus-Data for details of the list of metrics that Densify requires for analysis.

  5. Node Exporter—This is an agent deployed on every node to collect data about the nodes, on which the containers are running. This provides host-related metrics such as CPU, memory, network, etc.

The following item is not mandatory but provides additional environment information for Kubex's container optimization analysis.

  1. Openshift-state-metrics—Expands upon kube-state-metrics by adding metrics for OpenShift-specific resources and provides additional details such as Cluster Resource Quotas (CRQ).