suyambuganesh / purser

Kubernetes Cloud Native Applications visibility

K8s Extension for Application Visibility

• What is Purser?
• Features
• Setup and Installation
• Uninstalling
• API Documentation
• Additional Documentation
• Community, Discussion, Contribution and Support

Overview

Purser is an extension to Kubernetes tasked at providing an insight into cluster topology, costing, capacity allocations and resource interactions along with the provision of logical grouping of resources for Kubernetes based cloud native applications in a cloud neutral manner, with the focus on catering to a multitude of users ranging from Sys Admins, to DevOps to Developers.

It comprises of three components: a controller, a plugin and a UI dashboard.

The controller component deployed inside the cluster watches for K8s native and custom resources associated with the application, thereby, periodically building not just an inventory but also performing discovery by generating and storing the interactions among the resources such as containers, pods and services.

The plugin component is a CLI tool interfacing with the kubectl that helps query costs, savings defined at a level of control of the application level components rather than at the infrastructure level.

The UI dashboard is a robust application that renders the Purser UI for providing visual representation to the complete cluster metrics in a single pane of glass.

Demo

Features

Purser with it's robust CLI and UI capabilities provides a set of features including, but not limited to the list below.

• Capability to provide visibility into the following aspects of the K8s cluster

  • workload cost associated with the native/custom resources
  • savings opportunities associated with storage and compute requirements
  • single pane view of the complete cluster hierarchy
  • capacity allocations for CPU, memory, disk space and other resources
  • interactions among associated resources such as pods and services

• Capability of user defined logical grouping of resources based on K8s CRD implementation for enhanced filtering.

• A plugin extension to kubectl along with the UI for developer centric usage.

• Capability to subscribe to inventory changes via web-hook implementation.

UI Demo

Setup and Installation

Follow the instructions below to set up Purser in your environment.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes version 1.9 or greater.
• kubectl installed and configured. For details see here.

Installation

Purser has three components to install.

• Purser Setup
• Purser Plugin Setup

Purser Setup

The following steps will install Purser in your cluster at namespace purser. Creation of this namespace is needed because purser needs to create a service-account which requires namespace. Also, the frontend will use kubernetes DNS to call backend for data and this DNS contains a field for namespace.

# Namespace setup
kubectl create ns purser

# DB setup
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware/purser/master/cluster/purser-database-setup.yaml -O
kubectl --namespace=purser create -f purser-database-setup.yaml

# Purser controller setup
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware/purser/master/cluster/purser-controller-setup.yaml -O
kubectl --namespace=purser create -f purser-controller-setup.yaml

# Purser UI setup
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vmware/purser/master/cluster/purser-ui-setup.yaml -O
kubectl --namespace=purser create -f purser-ui-setup.yaml

NOTE: If you don't have curl installed you can download purser-database-setup.yaml from here, purser-controller-setup.yaml from here and purser-ui-setup.yaml from here. Then kubectl create -f purser-database-setup.yaml , kubectl create -f purser-controller-setup.yaml and kubectl create -f purser-ui-setup.yaml will setup purser in your cluster.

Change Settings and Enable/Disable Purser Features

The following settings can be customized before Controller installation:

• Change the default log level, dgraph url and dgraph port by editing args field in the purser-controller-setup.yaml. (Default: --log=info, --dgraphURL=purser-db, --dgraphPort=9080)
• Enable/Disable resource interactions capability by editing args field in the purser-controller-setup.yaml and uncommenting pods/exec rule from purser-permissions. (Default: disabled)
• Enable subscription to inventory changes capability by creating an object of custom resource kind Subscriber. (Refer: example-subscriber.yaml)
• Enable customized logical grouping of resources by creating an object of custom resource kind Group. (Refer: docs for custom group installation and usage)

NOTE: Use flag --kubeconfig=<absolute path to config> if your cluster configuration is not at the default location.

Purser Plugin Setup

Linux and macOS

# Binary installation
wget -q https://github.com/vmware/purser/blob/master/build/purser-binary-install.sh && sh purser-binary-install.sh

Enter your cluster's configuration path when prompted. The plugin binary needs to be in your PATH environment variable, so once the download of the binary is finished the script tries to move it to /usr/local/bin. This may need your sudo permission.

Windows

For installation on Windows follow the steps in the manual installation guide.

Other Installation Methods

For other installation methods such as manual installation or installation from source code refer guides in docs.

Uninstalling

Uninstalling Purser

kubectl --namespace=purser delete -f purser-database-setup.yaml
kubectl --namespace=purser delete -f purser-controller-setup.yaml
kubectl --namespace=purser delete -f purser-ui-setup.yaml
kubectl --namespace=purser delete pvc datadir-purser-dgraph-0

NOTE: Use flag --kubeconfig=<absolute path to config> if your cluster configuration is not at the default location.

Uninstalling Purser Binary

Linux/macOS

wget -q https://github.com/vmware/purser/blob/master/build/purser-binary-uninstall.sh && sh purser-binary-uninstall.sh

API Documentation

The project uses Swagger to document API's endpoints. The documentation is available at Swagger Hub.

Additional Documentation

Additional documentation can be found below:

• Manual Installation Guide
• Source Code Installation Guide
• Purser Architecture and Workflow
• Purser Plugin Usage
• Developers Guide
• Purser Deployment Guide
• Purser UI Development Guide

Community, Discussion, Contribution and Support

Issues: Have an issue with Purser, please log it.

Contributing: Would you like to contribute to our project, refer How to contribute, Developers Guide and Code of Conduct docs.