How to spin up the TICK Stack in a Kubernetes instance

By Jack Zampolin / Product
Nov 30, 2016

Given my interest in Kubernetes, and the recent work we have done to make it easy to use InfluxDB monitoring of a Kubernetes cluster (kubernetes telegraph plugin, kapacitor kubernetes output, chronograf OSS release) I decided to put together an easy way to spin up the full stack in a Kubernetes instance.

Motivation

You might ask, doesn’t Kubernetes come with built in monitoring? Why yes, it does! That monitoring and log aggregation is handled differently depending on your cluster configuration and providence. The metrics monitoring is done by default with heapster. Sometimes this is powered by InfluxDB.

Heapster doesn’t do the best job of following InfluxDB schema best practices. It’s also sparsely documented and has stopped adding new features. I wanted an easy way to create demos and Proof of Concepts (POCs) with rich live data. With the release of the new Chronograf and the canned dashboards it offers, this became possible.

To make it easy to deploy on different Kubernetes configurations, I decided to write the project as a series of Helm Charts. tick-charts is the result.

.
??? LICENSE
??? README.md
??? chronograf
?   ??? Chart.yaml
?   ??? README.md
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?   ?   ??? NOTES.txt
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?   ?   ??? deployment.yaml
?   ?   ??? pvc.yaml
?   ?   ??? service.yaml
?   ??? values.yaml
??? influxdb
?   ??? Chart.yaml
?   ??? README.md
?   ??? templates
?   ?   ??? NOTES.txt
?   ?   ??? _helpers.tpl
?   ?   ??? config.yaml
?   ?   ??? deployment.yaml
?   ?   ??? pvc.yaml
?   ?   ??? service.yaml
?   ??? values.yaml
??? kapacitor
?   ??? Chart.yaml
?   ??? README.md
?   ??? templates
?   ?   ??? NOTES.txt
?   ?   ??? _helpers.tpl
?   ?   ??? deployment.yaml
?   ?   ??? pvc.yaml
?   ?   ??? service.yaml
?   ??? values.yaml
??? telegraf
    ??? Chart.yaml
    ??? README.md
    ??? docs
    ?   ??? all-config-values.toml
    ?   ??? all-config-values.yaml
    ??? templates
    ?   ??? _helpers.tpl
    ?   ??? configmap-single.yaml
    ?   ??? conifgmap-ds.yaml
    ?   ??? daemonset.yaml
    ?   ??? deployment.yaml
    ?   ??? service.yaml
    ??? values.yaml

Helm

Before deploying the members of the stack we need to package them for Helm:

$ helm package influxdb chronograf telegraf kapacitor

Telegraf

$ helm install telegraf-0.1.0.tgz --name telegraf --namespace tick

From a high level the way the system works starts the Telegraf Daemonset:

# telegraf/daemonset.yaml
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: telegraf
  namespace: tick
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: telegraf
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: telegraf
          image: telegraf:1.1.0-alpine
          imagePullPolicy: Always
...

$ helm install influxdb-0.1.0.tgz --name influxdb --namespace tick

# influxdb/deployment.yaml
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: influxdb
  namespace: tick
...
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: influxdb:1.1.0-rc2-alpine
...
        volumeMounts:
        - name: config-volume
          mountPath: /etc/influxdb
        - name: influxdb
          mountPath: /var/lib/influxdb
...
      volumes:
      - name: config-volume
        configMap:
          name: influxdb-config
      - name: influxdb
        emptyDir: {}

# the args are {namespace} {app}
# It will attach to the first instance of app returned if multiple exist
# InfluxDB API will be available at localhost:8086
$ kubectl port forward $(kubectl get pods --all-namespaces -l app=influxdb-influxdb -o jsonpath='{ .items[0].metadata.name }') 8086:8086
# In another terminal window:
$ influx
> show databases
name: databases
name
----
telegraf
_internal

$ helm install chronograf-0.1.0.tgz --name chronograf --namespace tick

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: chronograf
  namespace: tick
spec:
  type: LoadBalancer
  ports:
  - port: 80
    name: http
    targetPort: 8888
    protocol: TCP
  selector:
    app: chronograf

$ helm install kapacitor-0.1.0.tgz --name kapacitor --namespace tick