Chapter 2. Developer metrics

Metrics enable developers to monitor how Knative services are performing. You can use the OpenShift Container Platform monitoring stack to record and view health checks and metrics for your Knative services.

You can view different metrics for OpenShift Serverless by navigating to Dashboards in the web console Developer perspective.

You can extend the set of metrics exported by a Knative service. The exact implementation depends on your application and the language used.

The following listing implements a sample Go application that exports the count of processed events custom metric.

package main

import (
  "fmt"
  "log"
  "net/http"
  "os"

  "github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus" 1
  "github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus/promauto"
  "github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus/promhttp"
)

var (
  opsProcessed = promauto.NewCounter(prometheus.CounterOpts{ 2
     Name: "myapp_processed_ops_total",
     Help: "The total number of processed events",
  })
)


func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
  log.Print("helloworld: received a request")
  target := os.Getenv("TARGET")
  if target == "" {
     target = "World"
  }
  fmt.Fprintf(w, "Hello %s!\n", target)
  opsProcessed.Inc() 3
}

func main() {
  log.Print("helloworld: starting server...")

  port := os.Getenv("PORT")
  if port == "" {
     port = "8080"
  }

  http.HandleFunc("/", handler)

  // Separate server for metrics requests
  go func() { 4
     mux := http.NewServeMux()
     server := &http.Server{
        Addr: fmt.Sprintf(":%s", "9095"),
        Handler: mux,
     }
     mux.Handle("/metrics", promhttp.Handler())
     log.Printf("prometheus: listening on port %s", 9095)
     log.Fatal(server.ListenAndServe())
  }()

   // Use same port as normal requests for metrics
  //http.Handle("/metrics", promhttp.Handler()) 5
  log.Printf("helloworld: listening on port %s", port)
  log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(fmt.Sprintf(":%s", port), nil))
}

Custom metrics scraping is performed by an instance of Prometheus purposed for user workload monitoring. After you enable user workload monitoring and create the application, you need a configuration that defines how the monitoring stack will scrape the metrics.

The following sample configuration defines the ksvc for your application and configures the service monitor. The exact configuration depends on your application and how it exports the metrics.

apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1 1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: helloworld-go
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: helloworld-go
      annotations:
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: docker.io/skonto/helloworld-go:metrics
        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: "200m"
        env:
        - name: TARGET
          value: "Go Sample v1"
---
apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1 2
kind: ServiceMonitor
metadata:
  labels:
  name: helloworld-go-sm
spec:
  endpoints:
  - port: queue-proxy-metrics
    scheme: http
  - port: app-metrics
    scheme: http
  namespaceSelector: {}
  selector:
    matchLabels:
       name:  helloworld-go-sm
---
apiVersion: v1 3
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    name:  helloworld-go-sm
  name:  helloworld-go-sm
spec:
  ports:
  - name: queue-proxy-metrics
    port: 9091
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 9091
  - name: app-metrics
    port: 9095
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: 9095
  selector:
    serving.knative.dev/service: helloworld-go
  type: ClusterIP

After you have configured the application to export the metrics and the monitoring stack to scrape them, you can examine the metrics in the web console.

You can examine the metrics using a dedicated dashboard that aggregates queue proxy metrics by namespace.