Getting Started

1. Sign in to Splunk Observability Cloud

You should have received an e-mail from Splunk inviting you to the Workshop Org. This e-mail will look like the screenshot below, if you cannot find it, please check your Spam/Junk folders or inform your Instructor. You can also check for other solutions in our login F.A.Q..

To proceed click the Join Now button or click on the link provided in the e-mail.

If you have already completed the registration process you can skip the rest and proceed directly to Splunk Observability Cloud and log in:

• https://app.eu0.signalfx.com (EMEA)
• https://app.us1.signalfx.com (APAC/AMER)

If this is your first time using Splunk Observability Cloud, you will be presented with the registration form. Enter your full name, and desired password. Please note that the password requirements are:

• Must be between 8 and 32 characters
• Must contain at least one capital letter
• Must have at least one number
• Must have at least one symbol (e.g. !@#$%^&*()_+)

Click the checkbox to agree to the terms and conditions and click the SIGN IN NOW button.

Real User Monitoring Overview

Splunk RUM is the industry’s only end-to-end, NoSample™ RUM solution - providing visibility into the full user experience of every web and mobile session to uniquely combine all front-end traces with back-end metrics, traces, and logs as they happen. IT Operations and Engineering teams can quickly scope, prioritize and isolate errors, measure how performance impacts real users and optimize end-user experiences by correlating performance metrics alongside video reconstructions of all user interactions.

Full user session analysis: Streaming analytics capture full user sessions from single and multi-page apps, measuring the customer impact of every resource, image, route change and API call.
Correlate issues faster: Infinite cardinality and full transaction analysis help you pinpoint and correlate issues faster across complex distributed systems.
Isolate latency and errors: Easily identify latency, errors and poor performance for each code change and deployment. Measure how content, images and third-party dependencies impact your customers.
Benchmark and improve page performance: Leverage core web vitals to measure and improve your page load experience, interactivity and visual stability. Find and fix impactful JavaScript errors, and easily understand which pages to improve first.
Explore meaningful metrics: Instantly visualize the customer impact with metrics on specific workflows, custom tags and auto-suggest un-indexed tags to quickly find the root cause of issues.
Optimize end-user experience: Correlate performance metrics alongside video reconstructions of all user interactions to optimize end-user experiences.

Application Performance Monitoring Overview

Splunk APM provides a NoSample™ end-to-end visibility of every service and its dependency to solve problems quicker across monoliths and microservices. Teams can immediately detect problems from new deployments, confidently troubleshoot by scoping and isolating the source of an issue, and optimize service performance by understanding how back-end services impact end users and business workflows.

Real-time monitoring and alerting: Splunk provides out-of-the-box service dashboards and automatically detects and alerts on RED metrics (rate, error and duration) when there is a sudden change. Dynamic telemetry maps: Easily visualize service performance in modern production environments in real-time. End-to-end visibility of service performance from infrastructure, applications, end users, and all dependencies helps quickly scope new issues and troubleshoot more effectively.
Intelligent tagging and analysis: View all tags from your business, infrastructure and applications in one place to easily compare new trends in latency or errors to their specific tag values.
AI-directed troubleshooting identifies the most impactful issues: Instead of manually digging through individual dashboards, isolate problems more efficiently. Automatically identify anomalies and the sources of errors that impact services and customers the most.
Complete distributed tracing analyses every transaction: Identify problems in your cloud-native environment more effectively. Splunk distributed tracing visualizes and correlates every transaction from the back-end and front-end in context with your infrastructure, business workflows and applications.
Full stack correlation: Within Splunk Observability, APM links traces, metrics, logs and profiling together to easily understand the performance of every component and its dependency across your stack.
Monitor database query performance: Easily identify how slow and high execution queries from SQL and NoSQL databases impact your services, endpoints and business workflows — no instrumentation required.

Log Observer Overview

Log Observer Connect allows you to seamlessly bring in the same log data from your Splunk Platform into an intuitive and no-code interface designed to help you find and fix problems quickly. You can easily perform log-based analysis and seamlessly correlate your logs with Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring’s real-time metrics and Splunk APM traces in one place.

End-to-end visibility: By combining the powerful logging capabilities of Splunk Platform with Splunk Observability Cloud’s traces and real-time metrics for deeper insights and more context of your hybrid environment.
Perform quick and easy log-based investigations: By reusing logs that are already ingested in Splunk Cloud Platform or Enterprise in a simplified and intuitive interface (no need to know SPL!) with customizable and out-of-the-box dashboards
Achieve higher economies of scale and operational efficiency: By centralizing log management across teams, breaking down data and team silos, and getting better overall support

Synthetics Overview

Splunk Synthetic Monitoring provides visibility across URLs, APIs and critical web services to solve problems faster. IT Operations and engineering teams can easily detect, alert and prioritize issues, simulate multi-step user journeys, measure business impact from new code deployments and optimize web performance with guided step-by-step recommendations to ensure better digital experiences.

Ensure Availability: Proactively monitor and alert on the health and availability of critical services, URLs and APIs with customizable browser tests to simulate multi-step workflows that make up the user experience.
Improve Metrics: Core Web Vitals and modern performance metrics allow users to view all their performance defects in one place, measure and improve page load, interactivity and visual stability, and find and fix JavaScript errors to improve page performance.
front-end to back-end: Integrations with Splunk APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, On-Call and ITSI help teams view endpoint uptime against back-end services, the underlying infrastructure and within their incident response coordination so they can troubleshoot across their entire environment, in a single UI.
Detect and Alert: Monitor and simulate end-user experiences to detect, communicate and resolve issues for APIs, service endpoints and critical business transactions before they impact customers.
Business Performance: Easily define multi-step user flows for key business transactions and start recording and testing your critical user journeys in minutes. Track and report SLAs and SLOs for uptime and performance.
Filmstrips and Video Playback: View screen recordings, film strips, and screenshots alongside modern performance scores, competitive benchmarking, and metrics to visualize artificial end-user experiences. Optimize how fast you deliver visual content, and improve page stability and interactivity to deploy better digital experiences.

Infrastructure Overview

Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring (IM) is a market-leading monitoring and observability service for hybrid cloud environments. Built on a patented streaming architecture, it provides a real-time solution for engineering teams to visualize and analyze performance across infrastructure, services, and applications in a fraction of the time and with greater accuracy than traditional solutions.

OpenTelemetry standardization: Gives you full control over your data — freeing you from vendor lock-in and implementing proprietary agents.
Splunk’s OTel Collector: Seamless installation and dynamic configuration, auto-discovers your entire stack in seconds for visibility across clouds, services, and systems.
300+ Easy-to-use OOTB content: Pre-built navigators and dashboards, deliver immediate visualizations of your entire environment so that you can interact with all your data in real time.
Kubernetes navigator: Provides an instant, comprehensive out-of-the-box hierarchical view of nodes, pods, and containers. Ramp up even the most novice Kubernetes user with easy-to-understand interactive cluster maps.
AutoDetect alerts and detectors: Automatically identify the most important metrics, out-of-the-box, to create alert conditions for detectors that accurately alert from the moment telemetry data is ingested and use real-time alerting capabilities for important notifications in seconds.
Log views in dashboards: Combine log messages and real-time metrics on one page with common filters and time controls for faster in-context troubleshooting.
Metrics pipeline management: Control metrics volume at the point of ingest without re-instrumentation with a set of aggregation and data-dropping rules to store and analyze only the needed data. Reduce metrics volume and optimize observability spend.

1. RUM Dashboard

In Splunk Observability Cloud from the main menu, click on RUM. you arrive at the RUM Home page, this view has already been covered in the short introduction earlier.

• UX Metrics: Page Views, Page Load and Web Vitals metrics.
• Front-end Health: Breakdown of Javascript Errors and Long Task duration and count.
• Back-end Health: Network Errors and Requests and Time to First Byte.
• Custom Events: RED metrics (Rate, Error & Duration) for custom events.

2. Tag Spotlight

In this dashboard view, you are presented with all the tags associated with the RUM data. Tags are key-value pairs that are used to identify the data. In this case, the tags are automatically generated by the OpenTelemetry instrumentation. The tags are used to filter the data and to create the charts and tables. The Tag Spotlight view allows you to drill down into a user session.

We now have a User Session table that is sorted by longest duration descending and includes the cities of all the users that have been shopping on the site. We could apply more filters to further narrow down the data e.g. OS version, browser version, etc.

3. Session Replay

RUM Session Replay can redact information, by default text is redacted. You can also redact images (which has been done for this workshop example). This is useful if you are replaying a session that contains sensitive information. You can also change the playback speed and pause the replay.

4. User Sessions

This brings up the APM Performance Summary. Having this end-to-end (RUM to APM) view is very useful when troubleshooting issues.

1. APM Explore

The APM Service Map displays the dependencies and connections among your instrumented and inferred services in APM. The map is dynamically generated based on your selections in the time range, environment, workflow, service, and tag filters.

When we clicked on the APM link in the RUM waterfall, filters were automatically added to the service map view to show the services that were involved in that WorkFlow Name (frontend:/cart/checkout).

You can see the services involved in the workflow in the Service Map. In the side pane, under Business Workflow, charts for the selected workflow are displayed. The Service Map and Business Workflow charts are synchronized. When you select a service in the Service Map, the charts in the Business Workflow pane are updated to show metrics for the selected service.

Splunk APM also provides a set of built-in dashboards that present charts and visualized metrics to help you see problems occurring in real time and quickly determine whether the problem is associated with a service, a specific endpoint, or the underlying infrastructure. Let’s have a closer look.

2. APM Service Dashboard

We need to understand if there is a pattern to this error rate. We have a handy tool for that, Tag Spotlight.

3. APM Tag Spotlight

There are two views available in Tag Spotlight. The default is Request/Errors and the other is Latency.

Request/Error charts display the total number of requests, errors, and root cause errors. The Latency charts display p50, p90, and p99 latency. These values are based on Troubleshooting MetricSets (TMS), which Splunk APM generates for every indexed span tag. These are known as RED metrics (request, error, and duration).

4. APM Service Breakdown

You will now see the paymentservice broken down into three services, gold, silver and bronze. Each tenant is broken down into two services, one for each version (v350.10 and v350.9).

Next, we need to drill down into a trace to see what is going on.

5. APM Trace Analyzer

As Splunk APM provides a NoSample™ end-to-end visibility of every service Splunk APM captures every trace. For this workshop, the Order Confirmation ID is available as a tag. This means that we can use this to search for the exact trace of the poor user experience you encountered earlier in the workshop.

The Trace & error count view shows the total traces and traces with errors in a stacked bar chart. You can use your mouse to select a specific period within the available time frame.

The Trace Duration view shows a heatmap of traces by duration. The heatmap represents 3 dimensions of data:

1. Time on the x-axis
2. Trace duration on the y-axis
3. The traces (or requests) per second are represented by the heatmap shades

You can use your mouse to select an area on the heatmap, to focus on a specific time period and trace duration range.

We have now filtered down to the exact trace where you encountered a poor user experience with a very long checkout wait. A secondary benefit to viewing this trace is that the trace will be accessible for up to 13 months. This will allow developers to come back to this issue at a later stage and still view this trace for example.

Next, we will walk through the trace waterfall.

6. APM Waterfall

We have arrived at the Trace Waterfall from the Trace Analyzer. A trace is a collection of spans that share the same trace ID, representing a unique transaction handled by your application and its constituent services.

Each span in Splunk APM captures a single operation. Splunk APM considers a span to be an error span if the operation that the span captures results in an error.

Related Content relies on specific metadata that allow APM, Infrastructure Monitoring, and Log Observer to pass filters around Observability Cloud. For related logs to work, you need to have the following metadata in your logs:

• service.name
• deployment.environment
• host.name
• trace_id
• span_id

1. Log Filtering

Log Observer (LO), can be used in multiple ways. In the quick tour, you used the LO no-code interface to search for specific entries in the logs. This section, however, assumes you have arrived in LO from a trace in APM using the Related Content link.

The advantage of this is, as it was with the link between RUM & APM, that you are looking at your logs within the context of your previous actions. In this case, the context is the time frame (1), which matches that of the trace and the filter (2) which is set to the trace_id.

This view will include all the log lines from all applications or services that participated in the back-end transaction started by the end-user interaction with the Online Boutique.

Even in a small application such as our Online Boutique, the sheer amount of logs found can make it hard to see the specific log lines that matter to the actual incident we are investigating.

Next, we will look at log entries in detail.

2. Viewing Log Entries

Before we look at a specific log line, let’s quickly recap what we have done so far and why we are here based on the 3 pillars of Observability:

• Using metrics we identified we have a problem with our application. This was obvious from the error rate in the Service Dashboards as it was higher than it should be.
• Using traces and span tags we found where the problem is. The paymentservice comprises of two versions, v350.9 and v350.10, and the error rate was 100% for v350.10.
• We did see that this error from the paymentservice v350.10 caused multiple retries and a long delay in the response back from the Online Boutique checkout.
• From the trace, using the power of Related Content, we arrived at the log entries for the failing paymentservice version. Now, we can determine what the problem is.

In the next part of the workshop, we will move from problem-finding mode into mitigation, prevention and process improvement mode.

Next up, creating log charts in a custom dashboard.

3. Log Timeline Chart

Once you have a specific view in Log Observer, it is very useful to be able to use that view in a dashboard, to help in the future with reducing the time to detect or resolve issues. As part of the workshop, we will create an example custom dashboard that will use these charts.

Let’s look at creating a Log Timeline chart. The Log Timeline chart is used for visualizing log messages over time. It is a great way to see the frequency of log messages and to identify patterns. It is also a great way to see the distribution of log messages across your environment. These charts can be saved to a custom dashboard.

Next, we will create a Log View chart.

4. Log View Chart

The next chart type that can be used with logs is the Log View chart type. This chart will allow us to see log messages based on predefined filters.

As with the previous Log Timeline chart, we will add a version of this chart to our Customer Health Service Dashboard:

In the next session, we will look at Splunk Synthetics and see how we can automate the testing of web-based applications.

1. Synthetics Dashboard

In Splunk Observability Cloud from the main menu, click on Synthetics. Click on All or Browser tests to see the list of active tests.

During our investigation in the RUM section, we found there was an issue with the Place Order Transaction. Let’s see if we can confirm this from the Synthetics test as well. We will be using the metric First byte time for the 4th page of the test, which is the Place Order step.

You will now be taken to the Run results for this particular test run.

2. Synthetics Test Detail

Right now we are looking at the result of a single Synthetic Browser Test. This test is split up into Business Transactions, think of this as a group of one or more logically related interactions that represent a business-critical user flow.

1. Filmstrip: Offers a set of screenshots of site performance so that you can see how the page responds in real-time.
2. Video: This lets you see exactly what a user trying to load your site from the location and device of a particular test run would experience.
3. Browser test metrics: A View that offers you a picture of website performance.
4. Synthetic transactions: List of the Synthetic transactions that made up the interaction with the site
5. Waterfall chart The waterfall chart is a visual representation of the interaction between the test runner and the site being tested.

By default, Splunk Synthetics provides screenshots and video capture of the test. This is useful for debugging issues. You can see, for example, the slow loading of large images, the slow rendering of a page etc.

3. Synthetics to APM

We now should have a view similar to the one below.

4. Synthetics Detector

Given you can run these tests 24/7, it is an ideal tool to get warned early if your tests are failing or starting to run longer than your agreed SLA instead of getting informed by social media, or Uptime websites.

To stop that from happening let’s detect if our test is taking more than 1.1 minutes.

Enhancing the Dashboard

As we already saved some useful log charts in a dashboard in the Log Observer exercise, we are going to extend that dashboard.

This is a Custom Health Dashboard for the **Payment service**,  
Please pay attention to any errors in the logs.
For more detail visit [link](https://https://www.splunk.com/en_us/products/observability.html)

This looks great, let’s continue and add more meaningful charts.

Adding Copied Charts

In this section, we are going to use the Copy and Paste functionality to extend our dashboard. Remember we copied some charts during the APM Service Dashboard section, we will now add those charts to our dashboard.

Next, we are going to create a custom chart based on our Synthetic test that is running.

Adding a Custom Chart

In this part of the workshop we are going to create a chart that we will add to our dashboard, we will also link it to the detector we previously built. This will allow us to see the behavior of our test and get alerted if one or more of our test runs breach its SLA.

Finally, we will run through a workshop wrap-up.

Key Takeaways

During the workshop, we have seen how the Splunk Observability Cloud in combination with the OpenTelemetry signals (metrics, traces and logs) can help you to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and also reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).

• We have a better understanding of the Main User interface and its components, the Landing, Infrastructure, APM, RUM, Synthetics, Dashboard pages, and a quick peek at the Settings page.
• Depending on time, we did an Infrastructure exercise and looked at Metrics used in the Kubernetes Navigators and saw related services found on our Kubernetes cluster:

• Understood what users were experiencing and used RUM & APM to Troubleshoot a particularly long page load, by following its trace across the front and back end and right to the log entries. We used tools like RUM Session replay and the APM Dependency map with Breakdown to discover what is causing our issue:

• Used Tag Spotlight, in both RUM and APM, to understand blast radius, detect trends and context for our performance issues and errors. We drilled down in Span’s in the APM Trace waterfall to see how services interacted and find errors:

• We used the Related content feature to follow the link between our Trace directly to the Logs related to our Trace and used filters to drill down to the exact cause of our issue.

• We then looked at Synthetics, which can simulate web and mobile traffic and we used the available Synthetic Test, first to confirm our finding from RUM/AMP and Log observer, then we created a Detector so we would be alerted if when the run time of a test exceeded our SLA.

• In the final exercise, we created a health dashboard to keep that running for our Developers and SREs on a TV screen:

NodeJS Zero-Config Workshop

The goal is to walk through the basic steps to configure the following components of the Splunk Observability Cloud platform:

• Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring (IM)
• Splunk Zero Configuration Auto Instrumentation for NodeJS (APM)
  • AlwaysOn Profiling
• Splunk Log Observer (LO)

We will deploy the OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop application in Kubernetes, which contains two NodeJS services (Frontend & Payment Service). Once the application and the OpenTelemetry Connector are up and running, we will start seeing metrics, traces and logs via the Zero Configuration Auto Instrumentation for NodeJS that will be used by the Splunk Observability Cloud platform to provide insights into the application.

Next, we will deploy the OpenTelemetry Demo.

graph TD
subgraph Service Diagram
accountingservice(Accounting Service):::golang
adservice(Ad Service):::java
cache[(Cache)]
cartservice(Cart Service):::dotnet
checkoutservice(Checkout Service):::golang
currencyservice(Currency Service):::cpp
emailservice(Email Service):::ruby
frauddetectionservice(Fraud Detection Service):::kotlin
frontend(Frontend):::typescript
frontendproxy(Frontend Proxy):::cpp
loadgenerator([Load Generator]):::python
paymentservice(Payment Service):::javascript
productcatalogservice(Product Catalog Service):::golang
quoteservice(Quote Service):::php
recommendationservice(Recommendation Service):::python
shippingservice(Shipping Service):::rust
featureflagservice(Feature Flag Service):::erlang
featureflagstore[(Feature Flag Store)]
queue[(queue)]
Internet -->|HTTP| frontendproxy
frontendproxy -->|HTTP| frontend
frontendproxy -->|HTTP| featureflagservice
loadgenerator -->|HTTP| frontendproxy
accountingservice -->|TCP| queue
cartservice --->|gRPC| featureflagservice
checkoutservice --->|gRPC| cartservice --> cache
checkoutservice --->|gRPC| productcatalogservice
checkoutservice --->|gRPC| currencyservice
checkoutservice --->|HTTP| emailservice
checkoutservice --->|gRPC| paymentservice
checkoutservice -->|gRPC| shippingservice
checkoutservice --->|TCP| queue
frontend -->|gRPC| adservice
frontend -->|gRPC| cartservice
frontend -->|gRPC| productcatalogservice
frontend -->|gRPC| checkoutservice
frontend -->|gRPC| currencyservice
frontend -->|gRPC| recommendationservice -->|gRPC| productcatalogservice
frontend -->|gRPC| shippingservice -->|HTTP| quoteservice
frauddetectionservice -->|TCP| queue
adservice --->|gRPC| featureflagservice
productcatalogservice -->|gRPC| featureflagservice
recommendationservice -->|gRPC| featureflagservice
shippingservice -->|gRPC| featureflagservice
featureflagservice --> featureflagstore
end

classDef dotnet fill:#178600,color:white;
classDef cpp fill:#f34b7d,color:white;
classDef erlang fill:#b83998,color:white;
classDef golang fill:#00add8,color:black;
classDef java fill:#b07219,color:white;
classDef javascript fill:#f1e05a,color:black;
classDef kotlin fill:#560ba1,color:white;
classDef php fill:#4f5d95,color:white;
classDef python fill:#3572A5,color:white;
classDef ruby fill:#701516,color:white;
classDef rust fill:#dea584,color:black;
classDef typescript fill:#e98516,color:black;

graph TD
subgraph Service Legend
  dotnetsvc(.NET):::dotnet
  cppsvc(C++):::cpp
  erlangsvc(Erlang/Elixir):::erlang
  golangsvc(Go):::golang
  javasvc(Java):::java
  javascriptsvc(JavaScript):::javascript
  kotlinsvc(Kotlin):::kotlin
  phpsvc(PHP):::php
  pythonsvc(Python):::python
  rubysvc(Ruby):::ruby
  rustsvc(Rust):::rust
  typescriptsvc(TypeScript):::typescript
end

classDef dotnet fill:#178600,color:white;
classDef cpp fill:#f34b7d,color:white;
classDef erlang fill:#b83998,color:white;
classDef golang fill:#00add8,color:black;
classDef java fill:#b07219,color:white;
classDef javascript fill:#f1e05a,color:black;
classDef kotlin fill:#560ba1,color:white;
classDef php fill:#4f5d95,color:white;
classDef python fill:#3572A5,color:white;
classDef ruby fill:#701516,color:white;
classDef rust fill:#dea584,color:black;
classDef typescript fill:#e98516,color:black;

Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector in Kubernetes using a NameSpace

1. Kubernetes Navigator 2.0 UI

We will be starting this workshop using the new Kubernetes Navigator so please check that you are already using the new Navigator.

When you select Infrastructure from the main menu on the left, followed by selecting Kubernetes, you should see two service panes (K8s nodes and K8s workloads) for Kubernetes, similar to the ones below:

2. Connect to EC2 instance

You will be able to connect to the workshop instance by using SSH from your Mac, Linux or Windows device. Open the link to the sheet provided by your instructor. This sheet contains the IP addresses and the password for the workshop instances.

3. Install Splunk OTel using Helm

Install the OpenTelemetry Collector using the Splunk Helm chart. First, add the Splunk Helm chart repository and update.

helm repo add splunk-otel-collector-chart https://signalfx.github.io/splunk-otel-collector-chart && helm repo update

Using ACCESS_TOKEN=<REDACTED>
Using REALM=eu0
"splunk-otel-collector-chart" has been added to your repositories
Using ACCESS_TOKEN=<REDACTED>
Using REALM=eu0
Hang tight while we grab the latest from your chart repositories...
...Successfully got an update from the "splunk-otel-collector-chart" chart repository
Update Complete. ⎈Happy Helming!⎈

Install the OpenTelemetry Collector Helm with the following commands, do NOT edit this:

helm install splunk-otel-collector \
--set="splunkObservability.realm=$REALM" \
--set="splunkObservability.accessToken=$ACCESS_TOKEN" \
--set="clusterName=$INSTANCE-k3s-cluster" \
--set="splunkObservability.logsEnabled=false" \
--set="logsEngine=otel" \
--set="splunkObservability.infrastructureMonitoringEventsEnabled=true" \
--set="splunkPlatform.endpoint=$HEC_URL" \
--set="splunkPlatform.token=$HEC_TOKEN" \
--set="splunkPlatform.index=splunk4rookies-workshop" \
splunk-otel-collector-chart/splunk-otel-collector \
-f ~/workshop/k3s/otel-collector.yaml

4. Verify Deployment

You can monitor the progress of the deployment by running kubectl get pods which should typically report that the new pods are up and running after about 30 seconds.

Ensure the status is reported as Running before continuing.

kubectl get pods

NAME                                                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
splunk-otel-collector-agent-pvstb                             2/2     Running   0          19s
splunk-otel-collector-k8s-cluster-receiver-6c454894f8-mqs8n   1/1     Running   0          19s

Use the label set by the helm install to tail logs (You will need to press ctrl + c to exit).

kubectl logs -l app=splunk-otel-collector -f --container otel-collector

Or use the installed k9s terminal UI.

helm delete splunk-otel-collector

Tour of the Kubernetes Navigator

1. Cluster vs Workload View

The Kubernetes Navigator offers you two separate use cases to view your Kubernetes data.

• The K8s workloads are focusing on providing information in regards to workloads a.k.a. your deployments.
• The K8s nodes are focusing on providing insight into the performance of clusters, nodes, pods and containers.

You will initially select either view depending on your need (you can switch between the view on the fly if required). The most common one we will use in this workshop is the workload view and we will focus on that specifically.

1.1 Finding your K8s Cluster Name

Your first task is to identify and find your cluster. The cluster will be named as determined by the preconfigured environment variable INSTANCE. To confirm the cluster name enter the following command in your terminal:

echo $INSTANCE-k3s-cluster

Please make a note of your cluster name as you will need this later in the workshop for filtering.

2. Workloads & Workload Details Pane

Go to the Infrastructure page in the Observability UI and select Kubernetes, this will offer you a set of Kubernetes services, one of them being the K8s workloads pane.

The pane will show a tiny graph giving you a bird’s eye view of the load being handled across those Workloads. Also, if there are any alerts for one of the workloads, you will see a small alert indicator as shown in the image below.

Click on the K8s workloads pane and you will be taken to the workload view.

Initially, you will see all the workloads for all clusters that are reported into your Observability Cloud Org. If an alert has fired for any of the workloads, it will be highlighted on the top right (as marked with a red stripe) in the image below. You can go directly to the alert by clicking it to expand it.

Now, let’s find your cluster by filtering on the field k8s.cluster.name in the filter toolbar (as marked with a blue stripe).

You should now just see information for your own cluster.

2.1 Using the Navigator Selection Chart

The K8s workloads table is a common feature used across most of the Navigators and will offer you a list view of the data you are viewing. In our case, it shows a list of Pods Failed grouped by k8s.namespace.name.

Now let’s change the list view to a heat map view by selecting either the Heat map icon or the List icon in the upper-right corner of the screen (as marked with the purple line).

Changing this option will result in the following visualization:

In this view, you will note that each workload is now a colored square. These squares will change color according to the Color by option you selected, as marked by the first green line in the image above. The colors give a visual indication of health and/or usage. You can check the meaning by hovering over the legend exclamation icon bottom right of the heatmaps.

Another valuable option in this screen is Find Outliers which provides historical analytics of your clusters based on what is selected in the Color by dropdown.

Now, let’s select the File system usage (bytes) from the Color by drop-down box, then click on the Find outliers drop-down as marked by a yellow line in the above image and make sure you change the Scope in the dialog to Per k8s.namespace.name and Deviation from Median as below:

The Find Outliers view is very useful when you need to view a selection of your workloads (or any service depending on the Navigator used) and quickly need to figure out if something has changed.

It will give you fast insight into items (workloads in our case) that are performing differently (both increased or decreased) which helps to make it easier to spot problems.

2.2 The Deployment Overview pane

The Deployment Overview pane gives you a quick insight into the status of your deployments. You can see at once if the pods of your deployments are Pending, Running, Succeeded, Failed or in an Unknown state.

• Running: Pod is deployed and in a running state
• Pending: Waiting to be deployed
• Succeeded: Pod has been deployed and completed its job and is finished
• Failed: Containers in the pod have run and returned some kind of error
• Unknown: Kubernetes isn’t reporting any of the known states. (This may be during the starting or stopping of pods, for example).

You can expand the Workload name by hovering your mouse on it, in case the name is longer than the chart allows.

To filter to a specific workload, you can click on three dots … next to the workload name in the k8s.workload.name column and choose Filter from the dropdown box.

This will add the selected workload to your filters. It would then list a single workload in the default namespace.

From the Heatmap above find the splunk-otel-collector-k8s-cluster-receiver in the default namespace and click on the square to see more information about the workload.

At this point, you can drill into the information of the pods, but that is outside the scope of this workshop.

3. Navigator Sidebar

Later in the workshop, you will deploy an Apache server into your cluster which will display an icon in the Navigator Sidebar.

In navigators for Kubernetes, you can track dependent services and containers in the navigator sidebar. To get the most out of the navigator sidebar you configure the services you want to track by configuring an extra dimension called service.name. For this workshop, we have already configured the extraDimensions in the collector configuration for monitoring Apache e.g.

extraDimensions:
  service.name: php-apache

The Navigator Sidebar will expand and a link to the discovered service will be added as seen in the image below:

This will allow for easy switching between Navigators. The same applies to your Apache server instance, it will have a Navigator Sidebar allowing you to quickly jump back to the Kubernetes Navigator.

Deploying PHP/Apache

1. Namespaces in Kubernetes

Most of our customers will make use of some kind of private or public cloud service to run Kubernetes. They often choose to have only a few large Kubernetes clusters as it is easier to manage centrally.

Namespaces are a way to organize these large Kubernetes clusters into virtual sub-clusters. This can be helpful when different teams or projects share a Kubernetes cluster as this will give them the easy ability to just see and work with their resources.

Any number of namespaces are supported within a cluster, each logically separated from others but with the ability to communicate with each other. Components are only visible when selecting a namespace or when adding the --all-namespaces flag to kubectl instead of allowing you to view just the components relevant to your project by selecting your namespace.

Most customers will want to install the applications into a separate namespace. This workshop will follow that best practice.

2. DNS and Services in Kubernetes

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a mechanism for linking various sorts of information with easy-to-remember names, such as IP addresses. Using a DNS system to translate request names into IP addresses makes it easy for end-users to reach their target domain name effortlessly.

Most Kubernetes clusters include an internal DNS service configured by default to offer a lightweight approach for service discovery. Even when Pods and Services are created, deleted, or shifted between nodes, built-in service discovery simplifies applications to identify and communicate with services on the Kubernetes clusters.

In short, the DNS system for Kubernetes will create a DNS entry for each Pod and Service. In general, a Pod has the following DNS resolution:

pod-name.my-namespace.pod.cluster-domain.example

For example, if a Pod in the default namespace has the Pod name my_pod, and the domain name for your cluster is cluster.local, then the Pod has a DNS name:

my_pod.default.pod.cluster.local

Any Pods exposed by a Service have the following DNS resolution available:

my_pod.service-name.my-namespace.svc.cluster-domain.example

More information can be found here: DNS for Service and Pods

3. Review OTel receiver for PHP/Apache

Inspect the YAML file ~/workshop/k3s/otel-apache.yaml and validate the contents using the following command:

cat ~/workshop/k3s/otel-apache.yaml

This file contains the configuration for the OpenTelemetry agent to monitor the PHP/Apache deployment.

agent:
  config:
    receivers:
      receiver_creator:
        receivers:
          smartagent/apache:
            rule: type == "port" && pod.name matches "apache" && port == 80
            config:
              type: collectd/apache
              url: http://php-apache-svc.apache.svc.cluster.local/server-status?auto
              extraDimensions:
                service.name: php-apache

4. Observation Rules in the OpenTelemetry config

The above file contains an observation rule for Apache using the OTel receiver_creator. This receiver can instantiate other receivers at runtime based on whether observed endpoints match a configured rule.

The configured rules will be evaluated for each endpoint discovered. If the rule evaluates to true, then the receiver for that rule will be started as configured against the matched endpoint.

In the file above we tell the OpenTelemetry agent to look for Pods that match the name apache and have port 80 open. Once found, the agent will configure an Apache receiver to read Apache metrics from the configured URL. Note, the K8s DNS-based URL in the above YAML for the service.

To use the Apache configuration, you can upgrade the existing Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector Helm chart to use the otel-apache.yaml file with the following command:

helm upgrade splunk-otel-collector \
--set="splunkObservability.realm=$REALM" \
--set="splunkObservability.accessToken=$ACCESS_TOKEN" \
--set="clusterName=$INSTANCE-k3s-cluster" \
--set="splunkObservability.logsEnabled=false" \
--set="logsEngine=otel" \
--set="splunkObservability.infrastructureMonitoringEventsEnabled=true" \
--set="splunkPlatform.endpoint=$HEC_URL" \
--set="splunkPlatform.token=$HEC_TOKEN" \
--set="splunkPlatform.index=splunk4rookies-workshop" \
splunk-otel-collector-chart/splunk-otel-collector \
-f ~/workshop/k3s/otel-collector.yaml \
-f ~/workshop/k3s/otel-apache.yaml

Release "splunk-otel-collector" has been upgraded. Happy Helming!
NAME: splunk-otel-collector
LAST DEPLOYED: Tue Feb  6 11:17:15 2024
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 2
TEST SUITE: None

5. Kubernetes ConfigMaps

A ConfigMap is an object in Kubernetes consisting of key-value pairs that can be injected into your application. With a ConfigMap, you can separate configuration from your Pods.

Using ConfigMap, you can prevent hardcoding configuration data. ConfigMaps are useful for storing and sharing non-sensitive, unencrypted configuration information.

The OpenTelemetry collector/agent uses ConfigMaps to store the configuration of the agent and the K8s Cluster receiver. You can/will always verify the current configuration of an agent after a change by running the following commands:

kubectl get cm

When you have a list of ConfigMaps from the namespace, select the one for the otel-agent and view it with the following command:

kubectl get cm splunk-otel-collector-otel-agent -o yaml

6. Review PHP/Apache deployment YAML

Inspect the YAML file ~/workshop/k3s/php-apache.yaml and validate the contents using the following command:

cat ~/workshop/k3s/php-apache.yaml

This file contains the configuration for the PHP/Apache deployment and will create a new StatefulSet with a single replica of the PHP/Apache image.

A stateless application does not care which network it is using, and it does not need permanent storage. Examples of stateless apps may include web servers such as Apache, Nginx, or Tomcat.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
  name: php-apache
spec:
  updateStrategy:
    type: RollingUpdate
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      run: php-apache
  serviceName: "php-apache-svc"
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        run: php-apache
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: php-apache
        image: ghcr.io/splunk/php-apache:latest
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
        resources:
          limits:
            cpu: "8"
            memory: "8Mi"
          requests:
            cpu: "6"
            memory: "4Mi"

---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: php-apache-svc
  labels:
    run: php-apache
spec:
  ports:
  - port: 80
  selector:
    run: php-apache

7. Deploy PHP/Apache

Create an apache namespace then deploy the PHP/Apache application to the cluster.

Create the apache namespace:

kubectl create namespace apache

Deploy the PHP/Apache application:

kubectl apply -f ~/workshop/k3s/php-apache.yaml -n apache

Ensure the deployment has been created:

kubectl get statefulset -n apache

Fix PHP/Apache Issue

1. Kubernetes Resources

Especially in Production Kubernetes Clusters, CPU and Memory are considered precious resources. Cluster Operators will normally require you to specify the amount of CPU and Memory your Pod or Service will require in the deployment, so they can have the Cluster automatically manage on which Node(s) your solution will be placed.

You do this by placing a Resource section in the deployment of your application/Pod

Example:

resources:
  limits:         # Maximum amount of CPU & memory for peek use
    cpu: "8"      # Maximum of 8 cores of CPU allowed at for peek use
    memory: "8Mi" # Maximum allowed 8Mb of memory
  requests:       # Request are the expected amount of CPU & memory for normal use
    cpu: "6"      # Requesting 4 cores of a CPU
    memory: "4Mi" # Requesting 4Mb of memory

More information can be found here: Resource Management for Pods and Containers

If your application or Pod will go over the limits set in your deployment, Kubernetes will kill and restart your Pod to protect the other applications on the Cluster.

Another scenario that you will run into is when there is not enough Memory or CPU on a Node. In that case, the Cluster will try to reschedule your Pod(s) on a different Node with more space.

If that fails, or if there is not enough space when you deploy your application, the Cluster will put your workload/deployment in schedule mode until there is enough room on any of the available Nodes to deploy the Pods according to their limits.

2. Fix PHP/Apache Deployment

To fix the PHP/Apache StatefulSet, edit ~/workshop/k3s/php-apache.yaml using the following commands to reduce the CPU resources:

vim ~/workshop/k3s/php-apache.yaml

Find the resources section and reduce the CPU limits to 1 and the CPU requests to 0.5:

resources:
  limits:
    cpu: "1"
    memory: "8Mi"
  requests:
    cpu: "0.5"
    memory: "4Mi"

Save the changes you have made. (Hint: Use Esc followed by :wq! to save your changes).

Now, we must delete the existing StatefulSet and re-create it. StatefulSets are immutable, so we must delete the existing one and re-create it with the new changes.

kubectl delete statefulset php-apache -n apache

Now, deploy your changes:

kubectl apply -f ~/workshop/k3s/php-apache.yaml -n apache

3. Validate the changes

You can validate the changes have been applied by running the following command:

kubectl describe statefulset php-apache -n apache

Validate the Pod is now running in Splunk Observability Cloud.

Monitor the Apache web servers Navigator dashboard for a few minutes.

4. Fix the memory issue

If you navigate back to the Apache dashboard, you will notice that metrics are no longer coming in. We have another resource issue and this time we are Out of Memory. Let’s edit the stateful set and increase the memory to what is shown in the image below:

kubectl edit statefulset php-apache -n apache

resources:
  limits:
    cpu: "1"
    memory: 16Mi
  requests:
    cpu: 500m
    memory: 12Mi

Save the changes you have made.

Because StatefulSets are immutable, we must delete the existing Pod and let the StatefulSet re-create it with the new changes.

kubectl delete pod php-apache-0 -n apache

Validate the changes have been applied by running the following command:

kubectl describe statefulset php-apache -n apache

Deploy Load Generator

Now let’s apply some load against the php-apache pod. To do this, you will need to start a different Pod to act as a client. The container within the client Pod runs in an infinite loop, sending HTTP GETs to the php-apache service.

1. Review loadgen YAML

Inspect the YAML file ~/workshop/k3s/loadgen.yaml and validate the contents using the following command:

cat ~/workshop/k3s/loadgen.yaml

This file contains the configuration for the load generator and will create a new ReplicaSet with two replicas of the load generator image.

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: ReplicaSet
metadata:
  name: loadgen
  labels:
    app: loadgen
spec:
  replicas: 2
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: loadgen
  template:
    metadata:
      name: loadgen
      labels:
        app: loadgen
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: infinite-calls
        image: busybox
        command:
        - /bin/sh
        - -c
        - "while true; do wget -q -O- http://php-apache-svc.apache.svc.cluster.local; done"

2. Create a new namespace

kubectl create namespace loadgen

3. Deploy the loadgen YAML

kubectl apply -f ~/workshop/k3s/loadgen.yaml --namespace loadgen

Once you have deployed the load generator, you can see the Pods running in the loadgen namespace. Use previous similar commands to check the status of the Pods from the command line.

4. Scale the load generator

A ReplicaSet is a process that runs multiple instances of a Pod and keeps the specified number of Pods constant. Its purpose is to maintain the specified number of Pod instances running in a cluster at any given time to prevent users from losing access to their application when a Pod fails or is inaccessible.

ReplicaSet helps bring up a new instance of a Pod when the existing one fails, scale it up when the running instances are not up to the specified number, and scale down or delete Pods if another instance with the same label is created. A ReplicaSet ensures that a specified number of Pod replicas are running continuously and helps with load-balancing in case of an increase in resource usage.

Let’s scale our ReplicaSet to 4 replicas using the following command:

kubectl scale replicaset/loadgen --replicas 4 -n loadgen

Validate the replicas are running from both the command line and Splunk Observability Cloud:

kubectl get replicaset loadgen -n loadgen

Let the load generator run for around 2-3 minutes and keep observing the metrics in the Kubernetes Navigator and the Apache Navigator.

Setup Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA)

In Kubernetes, a HorizontalPodAutoscaler automatically updates a workload resource (such as a Deployment or StatefulSet), to automatically scale the workload to match demand.

Horizontal scaling means that the response to increased load is to deploy more Pods. This is different from vertical scaling, which for Kubernetes would mean assigning more resources (for example: memory or CPU) to the Pods that are already running for the workload.

If the load decreases, and the number of Pods is above the configured minimum, the HorizontalPodAutoscaler instructs the workload resource (the Deployment, StatefulSet, or other similar resource) to scale back down.

1. Setup HPA

Inspect the ~/workshop/k3s/hpa.yaml file and validate the contents using the following command:

cat ~/workshop/k3s/hpa.yaml

This file contains the configuration for the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and will create a new HPA for the php-apache deployment.

apiVersion: autoscaling/v2
kind: HorizontalPodAutoscaler
metadata:
  name: php-apache
  namespace: apache
spec:
  maxReplicas: 4
  metrics:
  - type: Resource
    resource:
      name: cpu
      target:
        averageUtilization: 50
        type: Utilization
  - type: Resource
    resource:
      name: memory
      target:
        averageUtilization: 75
        type: Utilization
  minReplicas: 1
  scaleTargetRef:
    apiVersion: apps/v1
    kind: StatefulSet
    name: php-apache

Once deployed, php-apache will autoscale when either the average CPU usage goes above 50% or the average memory usage for the deployment goes above 75%, with a minimum of 1 pod and a maximum of 4 pods.

kubectl apply -f ~/workshop/k3s/hpa.yaml

2. Validate HPA

kubectl get hpa -n apache

Go to the Workloads or Node Detail tab in Kubernetes and check the HPA deployment.

3. Increase the HPA replica count

Increase the maxReplicas to 8

kubectl edit hpa php-apache -n apache

Save the changes you have made. (Hint: Use Esc followed by :wq! to save your changes).

Congratulations! You have completed the workshop.

Installing OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib

Download the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib distribution

The first step in installing the Open Telemetry Collector is downloading it. For our lab, we will use the wget command to download the .deb package from the OpenTelemetry Github repository.

Obtain the .deb package for your platform from the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib releases page

wget https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases/releases/download/v0.96.0/otelcol-contrib_0.96.0_linux_amd64.deb

Install the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib distribution

Install the .deb package using dpkg. Take a look at the dpkg Output tab below to see what the example output of a successful install will look like:

sudo dpkg -i otelcol-contrib_0.96.0_linux_amd64.deb

Selecting previously unselected package otelcol-contrib.
(Reading database ... 64218 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack otelcol-contrib_0.96.0_linux_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking otelcol-contrib (0.96.0) ...
Setting up otelcol-contrib (0.96.0) ...
Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/otelcol-contrib.service → /lib/systemd/system/otelcol-contrib.service.