Collect metrics from your workloads

This page outlines the process for scraping metrics from workloads in Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped environments to facilitate monitoring and data observability.

You can scrape and collect metrics your components produce over time. The monitoring platform offers a custom API to scrape metrics from running workloads within your Distributed Cloud project namespace. To scrape metrics, you deploy a MonitoringTarget custom resource to your project namespace in the Management API server. Upon deployment of this resource, the monitoring platform initiates data collection.

The MonitoringTarget custom resource directs the monitoring pipeline to scrape designated pods within your project. These pods must expose an HTTP endpoint that delivers metrics in a Prometheus exposition format, such as OpenMetrics. The scraped metrics are then displayed in your project's Grafana instance, providing insights into your application's operational state.

To configure the MonitoringTarget custom resource, you must specify the pods within your project namespace for metric collection. You can customize various settings, including the scraping frequency, the pods' metrics endpoint, labels, and annotations.

Before you begin

To get the permissions that you need to manage MonitoringTarget custom resources, ask your Organization IAM Admin or Project IAM Admin to grant you one of the associated MonitoringTarget roles.

Depending on the level of access and permissions you need, you might obtain creator, editor, or viewer roles for this resource in an organization or a project. For more information, see Prepare IAM permissions.

Configure the `MonitoringTarget` custom resource

The MonitoringTarget custom resource tells the monitoring platform where to collect metrics from. You can specify the pods for which you are collecting metrics, the metrics endpoint of those pods, the scrapping frequency, and any additional settings.

This resource defines the following configurations:

Targets: The pods and their endpoints within your project that expose metrics.
Scrape interval: How frequently you want to pull metrics from the selected endpoints.
Label customizations: Optional rules with any label modifications for metrics.

Choose one of the following methods for specifying metrics endpoints in the MonitoringTarget custom resource:

Static endpoints: You explicitly declare the endpoint (port, path, scheme) in the MonitoringTarget configuration.
Annotations: The pod metric endpoint information is retrieved from annotations within the container's Deployment file. This method offers more flexibility if each pod has different endpoints.

Static endpoints

Follow these steps to expose metrics from your selected pods on a statically defined endpoint:

Determine the Distributed Cloud project from which you want to gather metrics for monitoring.

In your pod's specification, declare the port that serves metrics in the containerPort field. The following example shows how to declare port 2112 in the pod's specification:

# ...
spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: your-container-name
        ports:
        - containerPort: 2112
# ...

In your MonitoringTarget configuration, specify the endpoint details (port, path, scheme) in the podMetricsEndpoints section to match the port you exposed in the pod's specification.

The following YAML file shows an example of a MonitoringTarget configuration where every selected pod has to expose metrics on the same endpoint, http://your-container-name:2112/metrics:

apiVersion: monitoring.gdc.goog/v1
kind: MonitoringTarget
metadata:
  # Choose the same namespace as the workload pods.
  namespace: your-project-namespace
  name: your-container-name
spec:
  selector:
      # Choose pod labels to consider for this job.
      # Optional: Map of key-value pairs.
      # Default: No filtering by label.
      # To consider every pod in the project namespace, remove selector fields.
    matchLabels:
      app: your-app-label
  podMetricsEndpoints:
    port:
      value: 2112
    path:
      # Choose any value for your endpoint.
      # The /metrics value is an example.
      value: /metrics
    scheme:
      value: http

Apply the MonitoringTarget configuration to the Management API server within the same namespace as your target pods:
```
kubectl --kubeconfig KUBECONFIG_PATH apply -f MONITORING_TARGET_NAME.yaml
```
Replace the following:
- KUBECONFIG_PATH: the path to the kubeconfig file for the Management API server.
- MONITORING_TARGET_NAME: the name of the MonitoringTarget definition file.

The monitoring platform begins collecting metrics.

Annotations

Follow these steps to expose metrics using annotations if each pod has different endpoints:

Determine the Distributed Cloud project from which you want to gather metrics for monitoring.

Add the following annotations to the annotations section of your container's Deployment file:

prometheus.io/path
prometheus.io/port
prometheus.io/scheme

The following example shows annotations for metrics on port 2112:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: your-container-name
  namespace: your-project-namespace
  labels:
    app: your-app-label
  annotations:
    # These annotations are not required. They demonstrate selecting
    # pod metric endpoints through annotations.
    prometheus.io/path: /metrics
    prometheus.io/port: \"2112\"
    prometheus.io/scheme: http

In your MonitoringTarget configuration, specify the annotations you added to the container's Deployment file in the podMetricsEndpoints section. This specification tells the custom resource to gather the metrics endpoint information from annotations on the selected pods.

The following YAML file shows an example of a MonitoringTarget configuration using annotations:

apiVersion: monitoring.gdc.goog/v1
kind: MonitoringTarget
metadata:
metadata:
  # Choose the same namespace as the workload pods.
  namespace: your-project-namespace
  name: your-container-name
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: your-app-label
  podMetricsEndpoints:
    port:
      annotation: prometheus.io/port
    path:
      annotation: prometheus.io/path
    scheme:
      annotation: prometheus.io/scheme

Apply the MonitoringTarget configuration to the Management API server within the same namespace as your target pods:
```
kubectl --kubeconfig KUBECONFIG_PATH apply -f MONITORING_TARGET_NAME.yaml
```
Replace the following:
- KUBECONFIG_PATH: the path to the kubeconfig file for the Management API server.
- MONITORING_TARGET_NAME: the name of the MonitoringTarget definition file.

The monitoring platform begins collecting metrics.

Refer to the complete MonitoringTarget specification and the API reference documentation for additional fields and options.

Complete `MonitoringTarget` specification

The following YAML file shows an example for the complete specification of the MonitoringTarget custom resource. For more information and a complete description of fields, see the API reference documentation.

apiVersion: monitoring.gdc.goog/v1
kind: MonitoringTarget
metadata:
  # Choose the same namespace as the workload pods.
  namespace: PROJECT_NAMESPACE
  name: MONITORING_TARGET_NAME
spec:
  # Choose matching pattern that identifies pods for this job.
  # Optional
  # Relationship between different selectors: AND
  selector:
    # Choose clusters to consider for this job.
    # Optional: List
    # Default: All clusters applicable to this project.
    # Relationship between different list elements: OR
    matchClusters:
    - string

    # Choose pod labels to consider for this job.
    # Optional: Map of key-value pairs.
    # Default: No filtering by label.
    # Relationship between different pairs: AND
    matchLabels:
      key1: value1

    # Choose annotations to consider for this job.
    # Optional: Map of key-value pairs
    # Default: No filtering by annotation
    # Relationship between different pairs: AND
    matchAnnotations:
      key1: value1

  # Configure the endpoint exposed for this job.
  podMetricsEndpoints:
    # Choose a port either through static value or annotation.
    # Optional
    # Annotation takes priority.
    # Default: static port 80
    port:
      value: integer
      annotation: string

    # Choose a path either through static value or annotation.
    # Optional
    # Annotation takes priority
    # Default: static path /metrics
    path:
      value: string
      annotation: string

    # Choose a scheme either through a static value (http or https) or annotation.
    # Optional
    # Annotation takes priority
    # Default: static scheme http
    scheme:
      value: string
      annotation: string

    # Choose the frequency to scrape the metrics endpoint defined in podMetricsEndpoints
    # Optional
    # Default: 60s
    scrapeInterval: string

    # Dynamically rewrite the label set of a target before it gets scraped.
    # https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/#relabel_config
    # Optional
    # Default: No filtering by label
    metricsRelabelings:
    - sourceLabels:
      - string
      separator: string
      regex: string
      action: string
      targetLabel: string
      replacement: string

Replace the following:

PROJECT_NAMESPACE: your project namespace.
MONITORING_TARGET_NAME: the name of the MonitoringTarget definition file.

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