Chapter 2. Power monitoring overview
Power monitoring is a Technology Preview feature only. Technology Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service level agreements (SLAs) and might not be functionally complete. Red Hat does not recommend using them in production. These features provide early access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process.
For more information about the support scope of Red Hat Technology Preview features, see Technology Preview Features Support Scope.
2.1. About power monitoring
You can use power monitoring for Red Hat OpenShift to monitor the power usage and identify power-consuming containers running in an OpenShift Container Platform cluster. Power monitoring collects and exports energy-related system statistics from various components, such as CPU and DRAM. It provides granular power consumption data for Kubernetes pods, namespaces, and nodes.
Power monitoring Technology Preview works only in bare-metal deployments. Most public cloud vendors do not expose Kernel Power Management Subsystems to virtual machines.
2.2. Power monitoring architecture
Power monitoring is made up of the following major components:
- The Power monitoring Operator
- For administrators, the Power monitoring Operator streamlines the monitoring of power usage for workloads by simplifying the deployment and management of Kepler in an OpenShift Container Platform cluster. The setup and configuration for the Power monitoring Operator are simplified by adding a Kepler custom resource definition (CRD). The Operator also manages operations, such as upgrading, removing, configuring, and redeploying Kepler.
- Kepler
- Kepler is a key component of power monitoring. It is responsible for monitoring the power usage of containers running in OpenShift Container Platform. It generates metrics related to the power usage of both nodes and containers.
2.3. Kepler hardware and virtualization support
Kepler is the key component of power monitoring that collects real-time power consumption data from a node through one of the following methods:
- Kernel Power Management Subsystem (preferred)
-
rapl-sysfs
: This requires access to the/sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl
host file. -
rapl-msr
: This requires access to the/dev/cpu/*/msr
host file.
-
- The
estimator
power source Without access to the kernel’s power cap subsystem, Kepler uses a machine learning model to estimate the power usage of the CPU on the node.
WarningThe
estimator
feature is experimental, not supported, and should not be relied upon.
You can identify the power estimation method for a node by using the Power Monitoring / Overview dashboard.