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Chapter 2. Monitoring and logging with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Red Hat Developer Hub

In the Red Hat Developer Hub, monitoring and logging are facilitated through Amazon Web Services (AWS) integration. With features like Amazon CloudWatch for real-time monitoring and Amazon Prometheus for comprehensive logging, you can ensure the reliability, scalability, and compliance of your Developer Hub application hosted on AWS infrastructure.

This integration enables you to oversee, diagnose, and refine your applications in the Red Hat ecosystem, leading to an improved development and operational journey.

2.1. Monitoring with Amazon Prometheus
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Red Hat Developer Hub provides Prometheus metrics related to the running application. For more information about enabling or deploying Prometheus for EKS clusters, see Prometheus metrics in the Amazon documentation.

To monitor Developer Hub using Amazon Prometheus, you need to create an Amazon managed service for the Prometheus workspace and configure the ingestion of the Developer Hub Prometheus metrics. For more information, see Create a workspace and Ingest Prometheus metrics to the workspace sections in the Amazon documentation.

After ingesting Prometheus metrics into the created workspace, you can configure the metrics scraping to extract data from pods based on specific pod annotations.

2.1.1. Configuring annotations for monitoring
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You can configure the annotations for monitoring in both Helm deployment and Operator-backed deployment.

Helm deployment

To annotate the backstage pod for monitoring, update your values.yaml file as follows: 

upstream:
  backstage:
    # --- TRUNCATED ---
    podAnnotations:
      prometheus.io/scrape: 'true'
      prometheus.io/path: '/metrics'
      prometheus.io/port: '9464'
      prometheus.io/scheme: 'http'
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Operator-backed deployment

Procedure

  1. As an administrator of the operator, edit the default configuration to add Prometheus annotations as follows: 

    # Update OPERATOR_NS accordingly
OPERATOR_NS=rhdh-operator
kubectl edit configmap backstage-default-config -n "${OPERATOR_NS}"
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  2. Find the deployment.yaml key in the ConfigMap and add the annotations to the spec.template.metadata.annotations field as follows: 

    deployment.yaml: |-
  apiVersion: apps/v1
  kind: Deployment
  # --- truncated ---
  spec:
    template:
      # --- truncated ---
      metadata:
        labels:
         rhdh.redhat.com/app:  # placeholder for 'backstage-<cr-name>'
        # --- truncated ---
        annotations:
          prometheus.io/scrape: 'true'
          prometheus.io/path: '/metrics'
          prometheus.io/port: '9464'
          prometheus.io/scheme: 'http'
  # --- truncated ---
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  3. Save your changes.

Verification

To verify if the scraping works:

  1. Use kubectl to port-forward the Prometheus console to your local machine as follows: 

    kubectl --namespace=prometheus port-forward deploy/prometheus-server 9090
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  2. Open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:9090 to access the Prometheus console.
  3. Monitor relevant metrics, such as process_cpu_user_seconds_total.

2.2. Logging with Amazon CloudWatch logs
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Logging within the Red Hat Developer Hub relies on the winston library. By default, logs at the debug level are not recorded. To activate debug logs, you must set the environment variable LOG_LEVEL to debug in your Red Hat Developer Hub instance.

2.2.1. Configuring the application log level
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You can configure the application log level in both Helm deployment and Operator-backed deployment.

Helm deployment

To update the logging level, add the environment variable LOG_LEVEL to your Helm chart’s values.yaml file: 

upstream:
  backstage:
    # --- Truncated ---
    extraEnvVars:
      - name: LOG_LEVEL
        value: debug
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Operator-backed deployment

You can modify the logging level by including the environment variable LOG_LEVEL in your custom resource as follows: 

spec:
  # Other fields omitted
  application:
    extraEnvs:
      envs:
        - name: LOG_LEVEL
          value: debug
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2.2.2. Retrieving logs from Amazon CloudWatch
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The CloudWatch Container Insights are used to capture logs and metrics for Amazon EKS. For more information, see Logging for Amazon EKS documentation.

To capture the logs and metrics, install the Amazon CloudWatch Observability EKS add-on in your cluster. Following the setup of Container Insights, you can access container logs using Logs Insights or Live Tail views.

CloudWatch names the log group where all container logs are consolidated in the following manner:

/aws/containerinsights/<ClusterName>/application

Following is an example query to retrieve logs from the Developer Hub instance: 

fields @timestamp, @message, kubernetes.container_name
| filter kubernetes.container_name in ["install-dynamic-plugins", "backstage-backend"]
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