Demo Using Custom Prometheus Metrics for OpenShift Autoscaling with KEDA

Updated: 2024-12-25

Outline of Steps

• Enable Prometheus user workload monitoring

• Install the Custom Metrics Autoscaler Operator and provision a KedaController

• Deploy an application with custom metrics target and an associated ServiceMonitor

• Create Thanos serviceaccount, token, role, rolebinding

• Configure authentication from Keda to Thanos

• Deploy sample application to autoscale based on above metrics

• Define deployment to be scaled and the metrics which trigger the scaling with ScaledObject

Docs and Refs

• https://cloud.redhat.com/blog/custom-metrics-autoscaler-on-openshift

• Knative versus KEDA

• Enabling user workload monitoring in OpenShift

• https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.11/nodes/pods/nodes-pods-autoscaling-custom.html

• Autoscaling for RGW in ODF via HPA using KEDA

• https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.11/monitoring/managing-metrics.html

• https://github.com/rhobs/prometheus-example-app

• https://keda.sh/docs/2.8/scalers/prometheus/

• Enabling TLS in ServiceMonitor

• https://github.com/marrober/pipelineBuildExample

Prerequisites

Enable User Workload Monitoring

• OpenShift user workload monitoring

oc extract configmap/cluster-monitoring-config \
   -n openshift-monitoring --to=-\
  | yq eval '.enableUserWorkload = true' - > config.yaml
oc set data configmap/cluster-monitoring-config \
  --from-file=config.yaml -n openshift-monitoring

Confirm User Workload Monitoring

Check that pods for prometheus-operator, prometheus-user-workload and thanos-ruler-user-workload are running in the openshift-user-workload-monitoring project.

Granting non-admin users permission to monitor user-defined projects (optional)

Roles

• monitoring-rules-view grants read access to PrometheusRule custom resources for a project.

• monitoring-rules-edit grants create, modify, and deleting PrometheusRule custom resources for a project.

• monitoring-edit grants monitoring-rules-edit plus create new scrape targets for services or pods. With this role, you can also create, modify, and delete ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor resources.

Grant monitoring-edit role.

operator/readme.adoc

custom-metric-app/readme.adoc

scaled-app/readme.adoc

Managing metrics targets

As admin Observe → Targets → filter to 'keda-test' namespace.

Target http://<ip-address>:8080/metrics corresponds to endpoint of service 'prometheus-example-app'

Go to Observe → Metrics → promql query and search for "version" to see metric from custom metric app.

https://docs.openshift.com/container-platform/4.11/monitoring/managing-metrics-targets.html

Testing Autoscaling

Create a job that will generate traffic to the custom metric app. When the rate of traffic hits a 1 minute rolling average of 5 hits then the autoscaler will scale out the static-app deployment.

oc create -f load.yaml
# wait roughly a minute...
oc get pods
NAME                                      READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
generate-requests-55gsw-vw92t             0/1     Completed   0          66s
prometheus-example-app-6dcf7dcf8b-hzbl9   1/1     Running     0          6h58m
static-app-1-build                        0/1     Completed   0          7h38m
static-app-6944df7b7b-4zdnl               1/1     Running     0          12s
static-app-6944df7b7b-6lfpz               1/1     Running     0          12s
static-app-6944df7b7b-752qk               1/1     Running     0          26s
static-app-6944df7b7b-9pgrl               1/1     Running     0          26s
static-app-6944df7b7b-g2s6s               1/1     Running     0          26m
static-app-6944df7b7b-h2qjm               1/1     Running     0          27s
static-app-6944df7b7b-ldpl6               1/1     Running     0          26s
static-app-6944df7b7b-q7qpc               1/1     Running     0          12s
static-app-6944df7b7b-zdd5b               1/1     Running     0          12s

Metrics will now show a spike on the custom metric.