Observability

Container Storage Modules (CSM) for Observability is part of the open-source suite of Kubernetes storage enablers for Dell products.

It is an OpenTelemetry agent that collects array-level metrics for Dell storage so they can be exported into a Prometheus database. With CSM for Observability, you will gain visibility not only on the capacity of the volumes/file shares you manage with Dell CSM CSI (Container Storage Interface) drivers but also their performance in terms of bandwidth, IOPS, and response time.

Thanks to pre-packaged Grafana dashboards, you will be able to go through these metrics history and see the topology between a Kubernetes PV (Persistent Volume) and its translation as a LUN or file share in the backend array. This module also allows Kubernetes admins to collect array level metrics to check the overall capacity and performance directly from the Prometheus/Grafana tools rather than interfacing directly with the storage system itself.

Metrics data is collected and pushed to the OpenTelemetry Collector, so it can be processed, and exported in a format consumable by Prometheus. SSL certificates for TLS between nodes are handled by cert-manager.

CSM for Observability is composed of several services, each residing in its own GitHub repository, that can be installed following one of the four deployments we support here. Contributions can be made to this repository or any of the CSM for Observability repositories listed below.

CSM for Observability Capabilities

CSM for Observability provides the following capabilities:

Topology Data

CSM for Observability provides Kubernetes administrators with the topology data related to containerized storage. This topology data is visualized using Grafana:

TLS Encryption

CSM for Observability deployment relies on cert-manager to manage SSL certificates that are used to encrypt communication between various components. When deploying CSM for Observability, cert-manager is installed and configured automatically. The cert-manager components listed below will be installed alongside CSM for Observability.

If desired you may provide your own certificate key pair to be used inside the cluster by providing the path to the certificate and key in the Helm chart config. If you do not provide a certificate, one will be generated for you on installation.

NOTE: The certificate provided must be a CA certificate. This is to facilitate automated certificate rotation.

Viewing Logs

Logs can be viewed by using the kubectl logs CLI command to output logs for a specific Pod or Deployment.

For example, the following script will capture logs of all Pods in the CSM namespace and save the output to one file per Pod.

#!/bin/bash

namespace=[CSM_NAMESPACE]
for pod in $(kubectl get pods -n $namespace -o name); do
  logFileName=$(echo $pod | tr / -).txt
  kubectl logs -n $namespace $pod --all-containers > $logFileName
done