Using PX Central

Overview

With PX-Enterprise 2.0, Portworx just released PX-Central to simplify management, monitoring and metadata services for one or more Portworx Clusters on Kubernetes. Using this single pane of glass, enterprises can easily manage the state of their hybrid- and multi-cloud Kubernetes applications with embedded monitoring and metrics directly in the Portworx user interface.

Portworx Clusters needs to be updated to PX-Enterprise 2.0 before using PX-Central. In the first release, PX-Central includes the following components:

Key features

• Lighthouse GUI can be used to manage one or more Portworx clusters
• Grafana and Prometheus have shortcuts from Lighthouse for easy access.
• Prometheus will scrape the nodes for metrics.
• AlertManager will notify using a set of default rules
• Grafana will use Prometheus as it’s datasource and includes pre-built dashboards for Portworx cluster, node and volume monitoring.

• Grafana will also have pre-built etcd dashboard (from community) to monitor metadata cluster

• Lighthouse - Quick birds-eye view of your multi-cluster Portworx deployment to ensure things are running smoothly.

• Prometheus + Grafana + Alertmanager - Most effective pro-active monitoring solution to analyze change in key metrics over a period of time and alert on anomalies.

• PX-kvdb: Built-in key-value database for storing metadata belonging to Portworx services

Deployment Scenarios

Using PX-Central with a single Portworx Cluster

In this scenario, all the components are running alongside PX-Enterprise in the same cluster. The deployment links the clusterID for the Portworx cluster to the individual services within PX-Central. Use this scenario if you are installing for the first time, cluster size is small and you don’t plan to setup multiple clusters initially.

Using PX-Central (dedicated mode) with multiple Portworx clusters

In this scenario, all the components are running on a dedicated set of nodes outside of the PX-Enterprise clusters. The deployment links the clusterID for the Portworx cluster(s) to the individual services within PX-Central. Use this scenario if you are installing larger clusters, plan to scale deployment by adding additional clusters in future cluster size is small and want centralized control.

Using PX-Central (shared mode) with multiple PX-Clusters

In this scenario, all the components are running on one of the PX-Enterprise clusters and connected to others. The deployment links the clusterID for the Portworx cluster(s) to the individual services within PX-Central. Use this scenario only if you have a larger first cluster and are not sure when you will add additional clusters.

Setting up PX-Central

PX-Central can be setup for any of the above deployment scenarios by following a few steps. Note that Portworx will also be installed as a part of this process for new installations.

Pre-requisites

• Have a K8S cluster running

• Have the Prometheus Operator spec installed.

  kubectl apply -f portworx-pxc-operator.yaml

• Have the Alert Manager Secret template created. Replace the values corresponding to your email settings.

  kubectl create secret generic alertmanager-portworx --from-file=alertmanager.yaml -n kube-system

For more information on how to configure the alertmanager settings please visit: https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/configuration/

PX-Central for new PX installations

Go to https://install.portworx.com/2.1 and follow the steps.

To enable PX-Central, make sure that in Advanced Settings Lighthouse and Monitoring have been ticked.

Multi-Cluster requirements

If your cluster has more than 20 nodes or is resource intensive we recommend using this installation to create a dedicated monitoring cluster, and let this cluster monitor the others. If not consider using the single cluster installation (above). The steps below will help you setup PX-Central and first PX-Enterprise Cluster.

Since this is going to be the cluster that monitors the other clusters we need the Prometheus installation to watch the other clusters’ Prometheus instances. To do this we are going to use Federation and we’ll need the below secret for this.

Create a secret using this template. Replace the values corresponding to your other K8S clusters.

  kubectl create secret generic additional-scrape-configs --from-file=portworx-pxc-prometheus-additional.yaml -n kube-system

Once you have downloaded the yaml from the spec generator. Open it up and make a slight addition.

Search for Kind: Prometheus and in this section paste the following snippet above ruleSelector:

    additionalScrapeConfigs:
      name: additional-scrape-configs
      key: portworx-pxc-prometheus-additional.yaml

Now apply the spec as normal.

Subsequent clusters:

• Generate a new spec
• Apply the spec
• Add the new cluster to the Lighthouse instance in this cluster.

• Then in order to enable Prometheus monitoring on this new cluster, update the prometheus secret by adding external ip or LoadBalancer IP and the required port for the cluster.

  kubectl create secret generic additional-scrape-configs --from-file=portworx-pxc-prometheus-additional.yaml -n kube-system --dry-run -o yaml | kubectl apply -f -

Lighthouse access details

• If you are running on cloud, Lighthouse can be be accessed using a LoadBalancer service.

  • First get the external IP address that the lighthouse service is using

    kubectl get svc -n kube-system  px-lighthouse

  • Now go to http://<external_ip>

• If you are running on premise, Lighthouse can be accessed using a NodePort service

  • First get the node port that lighthouse is using

    kubectl get svc -n kube-system  px-lighthouse

  • Now go to http://<master_ip>:<service_nodeport>

• The default login is admin/Password1

Prometheus and Grafana access details

Prometheus & Grafana can be be accessed using a NodePort service.

• First get the node ports that prometheus and grafana are using

  kubectl get svc -n kube-system prometheus
  kubectl get svc -n kube-system grafana

• For Prometheus, go to http://<master_ip>:<service_nodeport>

• For Grafana http://<master_ip>:<service_nodeport>.

Verifying the setup

Once all the pods are up and running, you can verify different components of PX-Central as follows.

PX-kvdb

Quick way to Identify nodes running px-kvdb is by running the pxctl command below on one of the cluster nodes

pxctl service kvdb members

Kvdb Cluster Members:
ID                    PEER URLs            CLIENT URLs            LEADER    HEALTHY    DBSIZE
91b988c5-7a6e-4d3d-9ca1-a54a388a0741    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9018]    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9019]    false    true    1.7 GiB
95899ae7-c884-47f8-8e1b-12474a77619d    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9018]    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9019]    false    true    1.7 GiB
9f70d2ae-a6e6-480c-9825-0764efe0c417    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9018]    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9019]    false    true    1.7 GiB
394fa1ae-7266-426a-99bc-5f87a5fd3e8e    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9018]    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9019]    false    true    1.7 GiB
5fc10a25-4bf4-4681-b737-bb8d4753cfb6    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9018]    [http://XX.XX.XX.XX:9019]    true    true    1.7 GiB

Prometheus

Verify Prometheus is up and running by logging into Prometheus (external_ip:port). Click the ‘targets’ from Status dropdown as shown below to verify if all the targets are scraped. In the example below, you can see the PX-kvdb nodes (port:9019) and PX-Enterprise (port:9001) cluster nodes as targets

Grafana

Verify that the grafana service is up and running by logging into Grafana (default username/password) using the (external_ip:port). Check if the datasource is correctly setup as shown below:

Next step is to make sure you are able to view the built-in dashboards for Portworx and PX-kvdb. Here is a screenshot from the PX-kvdb dashboard.

PX-Central for existing PX-installation

For customers with existing Portworx deployment, it will require the following steps to add PX-Central:

• Identify set of nodes (minimum 3) with the required specifications to deploy PX-Central components.

• First, install the monitoring components (Prometheus, Alertmanager and Grafana) on these nodes to validate you can connect to existing PX clusters.

• Install Lighthouse. Add all the clusters to Lighthouse.

• Follow the process to migrate etcd from the existing to the new one installed as part of PX-Central. PX-kvdb needs underlying PX installation to complete before migration starts.

Limitations

Sizing guide (for metadata services)

PX-Central node configuration for running metadata services is described in the table below (minimum 3 nodes):

Troubleshooting

Unable to access Lighthouse

• Verify if the pod is running

  kubectl get pods -n kube-system | grep px-lighthouse

  kubectl describe pod <lighthouse pod id> -n kube-system

• See “Lighthouse access details” on this page for details on how to access Lighthouse

Unable to see metrics in Grafana?

• Verify Portworx is up and running

  kubectl get pods -n kube-system | grep portworx

• Verify Prometheus is running

  kubectl get pods -n kube-system | grep prometheus

• Check targets in Prometheus

• Check stats in Prometheus

• If only volume metrics are not seen, make sure the volumes are attached/mounted.

Unable to see any alerts reported via alertmanager?

• Check if the rules are correctly setup in Prometheus

• Verify Portworx is up and running

  kubectl get pods -n kube-system | grep portworx

Not seeing notification emails?

Make sure you did set-up the email configuration in step1 above.