Installation guide

The installation guide details the installation on a cloud environment. Contact us at [email protected] for help on a custom installation.

Deploy the monitoring stack

Preparing the context

Add the repository prometheus-community to the helm collection:

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update

Set up the CONTEXT, to make sure on which cluster the deployment will be done Example here on a GCP environment

CONTEXT='gke_my_test_project_us-west1_my-vectice-cluster'
TARGET_URL='https://monitoring-vectice.my-company.com'

Create the monitoring namespace

kubectl --context $CONTEXT create namespace monitoring

Generate the certificate, in order to add it to a secret, in the namespace, the key and cert filenames are examples

keypath='/tmp/vectice-monitoring-cert.key'
certpath='/tmp/vectice-monitoring-cert.crt'
openssl req -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -days 3650 -keyout $keypath -out $certpath -subj '/CN=${TARGET_URL}'
kubectl --context $CONTEXT -n monitoring create secret tls monitoring-tls --key $keypath --cert $certpath

Customize the deployment

Retrieve values.yaml file from here and then make it a copy to myvaluesfile.yaml Then, you can edit myvaluesfile.yml, following the instructions on the customizing page.

cp values.yaml myvaluesfile.yml

Run the deployment

helm --kube-context $CONTEXT install -n monitoring prometh prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack -f myvaluesfile.yml

Upgrade the monitoring stack

helm --kube-context $CONTEXT -n monitoring upgrade prometh prometheus-community/kube-prometheus-stack -f myvaluesfile.yml

Undeploy the monitoring stack

This will delete the monitoring stack installed

helm --kube-context $CONTEXT -n monitoring uninstall prometh

Configuring Grafana

Once your application is up and running, a few things are necessary to make it easy to access and monitor.

First, grab the public IP address assigned to your application. Then, head over to your DNS provider and connect your domain name to that IP address. This will give your application a memorable web address you can easily share.

Next, customize your Grafana instance with some dashboards. These dashboards will help you visualize and understand how your application is performing.

Vectice can provide you grafana dashboards templates on demand.

Adding other datasources

If you're using Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you can set up GCP monitoring as a data source for even more insights. There's a handy guide here to walk you through the steps.

Ensure you have a service account with the proper permissions. You can call it "grafana-exporter" and permit it to view monitoring data (the "Monitoring Viewer" role). Then, create a JSON key and import it into Grafana. This will allow Grafana to access the monitoring data from GCP.

If you want to personalize your Grafana experience, you can easily set your preferred dashboard as the default one you see when you log in. Just go to your user profile settings and make the switch."