Integrating with COS Lite¶

It is often advisable to have a monitoring solution which will run whether the cluster itself is running or not. It may also be useful to integrate monitoring into existing setups.

To make monitoring your cluster a delightful experience, Canonical provides first-class integration between Canonical Kubernetes and COS Lite (Canonical Observability Stack). This guide will help you integrate a COS Lite deployment with a Canonical Kubernetes deployment.

This document assumes you have a controller with an installation of Canonical Kubernetes. If you have not yet installed Canonical Kubernetes, please see “Installing Canonical Kubernetes”.

Preparing a platform for COS Lite¶

If you are unfamiliar with Juju models, the documentation can be found here. In this section, we’ll be adding a new model to keep observability separate from the Kubernetes model.

First, create a MicroK8s model to act as a deployment cloud for COS Lite:

juju add-model --config logging-config='<root>=DEBUG' microk8s-ubuntu

We also set the logging level to DEBUG so that helpful debug information is shown when you use juju debug-log (see juju debug-log).

Use the Ubuntu charm to deploy an application named “microk8s”:

juju deploy ubuntu microk8s --series=focal --constraints="mem=8G cores=4 root-disk=30G"

Deploy MicroK8s on Ubuntu by accessing the unit you created at the last step with juju ssh microk8s/0 and following the Install Microk8s guide for configuration.

Note

Make sure to enable the hostpath-storage and MetalLB addons for Microk8s.

Export the Microk8s kubeconfig file to your current directory after configuration:

juju ssh microk8s/0 -- microk8s config > microk8s-config.yaml

KUBECONFIG=microk8s-config.yaml juju add-k8s microk8s-cloud

Deploying COS Lite on the Microk8s cloud¶

On the Microk8s cloud, create a new model and deploy the cos-lite bundle:

juju add-model cos-lite microk8s-cloud
juju deploy cos-lite

Make COS Lite’s endpoints available for cross-model integration:

juju offer grafana:grafana-dashboard
juju offer prometheus:receive-remote-write

Use juju status --relations to verify that both grafana and prometheus offerings are listed.

At this point, you’ve established a MicroK8s model on Ubuntu and incorporated it into Juju as a Kubernetes cloud. You then used this cloud as a substrate for the COS Lite deployment. You therefore have 2 models on the same controller.

Integrating COS Lite with Canonical Kubernetes¶

Switch to your Canonical Kubernetes model (if you forgot the name of your model, you can run juju models to see a list of available models):

juju switch <canonical-kubernetes-model>

Consume the COS Lite endpoints:

juju consume cos-lite.grafana
juju consume cos-lite.prometheus

Deploy the grafana-agent:

juju deploy grafana-agent

Relate grafana-agent to k8s:

juju integrate grafana-agent:cos-agent k8s:cos-agent

Relate grafana-agent to the COS Lite offered interfaces:

juju integrate grafana-agent grafana
juju integrate grafana-agent prometheus

Get the credentials and login URL for Grafana:

juju run grafana/0 get-admin-password -m cos-lite

The above command will output:

admin-password: b9OhxF5ndUDO
url: http://10.246.154.87/cos-lite-grafana

The username for this credential is admin.

You’ve successfully gained access to a comprehensive observability stack. Visit the URL and use the credentials to log in.

Once you feel ready to dive deeper into your shiny new observability platform, you can head over to the COS Lite documentation.