Add on: fluentd

Homepage: https://www.fluentd.org/
Supported arch: amd64

Enabling this addon will add Elasticsearch, Fluentd and Kibana (the EFK stack) to MicroK8s. The components will be installed and connected together.

To enable the addon:

microk8s enable fluentd

To access the Kibana dashboard on a v1.21 or newer cluster, point your browser at http://127.0.0.1:8181 after forwarding the kibana-logging port:

microk8s.kubectl port-forward -n kube-system service/kibana-logging 8181:5601

On a cluster prior to v1.21 you should first start the kube proxy service:

microk8s kubectl proxy

The dashboard should be available at:
http://127.0.0.1:8001/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kibana-logging/proxy/app/kibana

Note that you will still need to set up Kibana to track whatever you are
interested in. For more details see the official Kibana documentation.

The addon can be disabled at any time with the command:

microk8s disable fluentd

Hello, How can I configure the fluentd? how can my app access it?

The proper way to access kibana is actually to do this:

$ microk8s kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes control plane is running at https://192.168.1.1:16443
...
Kibana is running at https://192.168.116.50:16443/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kibana-logging/proxy

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.

Open the link mentioned in the reply of cluster-info.

For this to work, you fist need to modify Kibana’s deployment as the microk8s add-on is wrongly configured:

$ microk8s kubectl set env deployments.apps kibana-logging \
  SERVER_BASEPATH=/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kibana-logging/proxy

I am not sure if I should modify the wiki or if someone else is responsible for that. Please advise.

@gildas it is published as a wiki so anyone can contribute if you want to. I do check over the additions :slightly_smiling_face:
however, if there is a bug in the deployment we should probably fix that rather than document it @kjackal ?

I use port-forward instead.

@evilnick, sure, but I don’t want to overstep and break things that were done other ways before (as @balchua1 mentions).

That said, I installed a brand new microk8s and enabled fluentd. The kubectl proxy mentioned in the wiki didn’t work. I could see in the web console the pages trying to get js/css resources using the wrong path.
That’s why I decided to explore the kubectl cluster-info method and realized the kibana deployment was just an environment variable away from working.

IMHO, I kind of like the cluster-info as I don’t have to remember to run a kubectl proxy or kubectl port-forward in another shell. Plus, as it is deployed today, the add-on adds kibana in the cluster-info, so best to use it.
The drawback of cluster-info lies in the self-signed certificate that modern browsers really do not like.

FYI, we are getting a 404 Not found atm for https://microk8s.io/docs/addon-fluentd or even other add-ons.

How heavy is the fluentd stack? Will my pi’s be able to run this load?

Its elastic which is going to be kindda heavy. Whats your rpi specs?

(3x) raspberry pi’s 4, each with 4gb of ram, and 64 gb of space

If you’re not going to index too many logs(few MBs), the default settings configured for elasticsearch seems ok to me.

Here’s what i notice about elasticsearch, it uses a good amount of memory and IO if you’re indexing lots of your logs. Fluentd isn’t that of a resource hog.

In many cases I’ve seen, elastic is often allocated to its own dedicated node. But these are heavily used elastics.

Another option that i tend to use lately is Loki The logging stuffs from grafana. A bit less storage needs but also less features unlike a full text search engine like elastic.

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The link for the following is broken:

upstream docs on EFK

Is it possible to update?

Thanks for the report @miah0x41 - it seems the upstream docs have had a clearout and no longer document Kibana, so I removed the link. The official docs are still good and there are loads of tutorials for kibana if you do a quick search.