Configure Observability with Prometheus and Grafana

The following article shows you how to install FSM with automatic provisioning of the Prometheus and Grafana stack for observability and monitoring. For an example using a bring your own (BYO) Prometheus and Grafana stack on your cluster with FSM, see the Integrate FSM with Prometheus and Grafana demo.

The configuration created in this article should not be used in production environments. For production-grade deployments, see Prometheus Operator and Deploy Grafana in Kubernetes.

Install FSM with Prometheus and Grafana

On fsm install, a Prometheus and/or Grafana instance can be automatically provisioned with the default FSM configuration.

 fsm install --set=fsm.deployPrometheus=true \
             --set=fsm.deployGrafana=true

More information on observability can be found in the Observability Guide.

Prometheus

When configured with the --set=fsm.deployPrometheus=true flag, FSM installation will deploy a Prometheus instance to scrape the sidecar and FSM control plane’s metrics endpoints. The scraping configuration file defines the default Prometheus behavior and the set of metrics collected by FSM.

Grafana

FSM can be configured to deploy a Grafana instance using the --set=fsm.deployGrafana=true flag in fsm install. FSM provides pre-configured dashboards that are documented in the FSM Grafana dashboards section of the Observability Guide.

Enable Metrics Scraping

Metrics can be enabled at the namespace scope using the fsm metrics command. By default, FSM does not configure metrics scraping for pods in the mesh.

fsm metrics enable --namespace test
fsm metrics enable --namespace "test1, test2"

Note: The namespace that you are enabling for metrics scraping must already be a part of the mesh.

Inspect Dashboards

The FSM Grafana dashboards can be viewed with the following command:

fsm dashboard

Navigate to http://localhost:3000 to access the Grafana dashboards. The default user name is admin and the default password is admin. On the Grafana homepage click on the Home icon, you will see a folder containing dashboards for both FSM Control Plane and FSM Data Plane.

Next Steps

Cleanup sample applications and uninstall FSM.