Netdata Helm chart for Kubernetes deployments

Based on the work of varyumin (https://github.com/varyumin/netdata).

This Helm chart is in beta.

Introduction

This chart bootstraps a Netdata deployment on a Kubernetes cluster using the Helm package manager.

The chart installs a Netdata child pod on each node of a cluster, using a Daemonset if not disabled, and a Netdata parent pod on one node, using a Deployment. The child pods function as headless collectors that collect and forward all the metrics to the parent pod. The parent pod uses persistent volumes to store metrics and alarms, handle alarm notifications, and provide the Netdata UI to view metrics using an ingress controller.

Please validate that the settings are suitable for your cluster before using them in production.

Prerequisites

• A working cluster running Kubernetes v1.9 or newer.
• The kubectl command line tool, within one minor version difference of your cluster, on an administrative system.
• The Helm package manager v3.0.0 or newer on the same administrative system.

Installing the Chart

See our install Netdata on Kubernetes documentation for detailed installation and configuration instructions.

Clone the repository locally.

git clone https://github.com/netdata/helmchart.git netdata-helmchart

To install the chart with the release name netdata:

helm install netdata ./netdata-helmchart

The command deploys ingress on the Kubernetes cluster in the default configuration. The configuration section lists the parameters that can be configured during installation.

Tip: List all releases using helm list.

Once the Netdata deployment is up and running, read our guide, Monitor a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster with Netdata, for a breakdown of all the collectors, metrics, and charts available for health monitoring and performance troubleshooting.

Uninstalling the Chart

To uninstall/delete the my-release deployment:

 helm delete netdata

The command removes all the Kubernetes components associated with the chart and deletes the release.

Configuration

The following table lists the configurable parameters of the netdata chart and their default values.

Example to set the parameters from the command line:

$ helm install ./netdata --name my-release \
    --set notifications.slackurl=MySlackAPIURL \
    --set notifications.slackrecipiet="@MyUser MyChannel"

Another example, to set a different ingress controller.

By default kubernetes.io/ingress.class set to use nginx as an ingress controller but you can set Traefik as your ingress controller by setting ingress.annotations.

$ helm install ./netdata --name my-release \
    --set ingress.annotations=kubernetes.io/ingress.class: traefik

Alternatively to passing each variable in the command line, a YAML file that specifies the values for the parameters can be provided while installing the chart. For example,

$ helm install ./netdata --name my-release -f values.yaml

Tip: You can use the default values.yaml

Note:: To opt out of anonymous statistics, set the DO_NOT_TRACK environment variable to non-zero or non-empty value in parent.env / child.env configuration (e.g: DO_NOT_TRACK: 1) or uncomment the line in values.yml.

Configuration files

To deploy additional netdata user configuration files, you will need to add similar entries to either the parent.configs or the child. configs arrays. Regardless of whether you add config files that reside directly under /etc/netdata or in a subdirectory such as /etc/netdata/go.d, you can use the already provided configurations as reference. For reference, the parent.configs the array includes an example alarm that would get triggered if the python.d example module was enabled.

Note that with the default configuration of this chart, the parent does the health checks and triggers alarms, but does not collect much data. As a result, the only other configuration files that might make sense to add to the parent are the alarm and alarm template definitions, under /etc/netdata/health.d.

Tip: Do pay attention to the indentation of the config file contents, as it matters for the parsing of the yaml file. Note that the first line under var: | must be indented with two more spaces relative to the preceding line:

  data: |-
    config line 1 #Need those two spaces
        config line 2 #No problem indenting more here

Service discovery and supported services

Netdata's service discovery, which is installed as part of the Helm chart installation, finds what services are running on a cluster's pods, converts that into configuration files, and exports them so they can be monitored.

Service discovery currently supports the following services via their associated collector:

• ActiveMQ
• Apache
• Bind
• CockroachDB
• Consul
• CoreDNS
• Fluentd
• FreeRADIUS
• HDFS
• Lighttpd
• Lighttpd2
• Logstash
• MySQL
• NGINX
• OpenVPN
• PHP-FPM
• RabbitMQ
• Solr
• Tengine
• Unbound
• VerneMQ
• ZooKeeper

Custom pod labels and annotations

Occasionally, you will want to add specific labels and annotations to the parent and/or child pods. You might want to do this to tell other applications on the cluster how to treat your pods, or simply to categorize applications on your cluster. You can label and annotate the parent and child pods by using the podLabels and podAnnotations dictionaries under the parent and child objects, respectively.

For example, suppose you're installing netdata on all your database nodes, and you'd like the child pods to be labeled with workload: database so that you're able to recognize this. At the same time, say you've configured chaoskube to kill all pods annotated with chaoskube.io/enabled: true, and you'd like chaoskube to be enabled for the parent pod but not the childs. You would do this by installing as:

$ helm install ./netdata --name my-release \
    --set child.podLabels.workload=database \
    --set 'child.podAnnotations.chaoskube\.io/enabled=false' \
    --set 'parent.podAnnotations.chaoskube\.io/enabled=true'