How-To: Set up Fluentd, Elastic search and Kibana in Kubernetes

How to install Fluentd, Elastic Search, and Kibana to search logs in Kubernetes

Prerequisites

Kubernetes (> 1.14)
kubectl
Helm 3

Install Elastic search and Kibana

Create namespace for monitoring tool and add Helm repo for Elastic Search
```
kubectl create namespace dapr-monitoring
```

Add Elastic helm repo

helm repo add elastic https://helm.elastic.co
helm repo update

Install Elastic Search using Helm

By default the chart creates 3 replicas which must be on different nodes. If your cluster has less than 3 nodes, specify a lower number of replicas. For example, this sets it to 1:

helm install elasticsearch elastic/elasticsearch -n dapr-monitoring --set replicas=1

Otherwise:

helm install elasticsearch elastic/elasticsearch -n dapr-monitoring

If you are using minikube or want to disable persistent volumes for development purposes, you can disable it by using the following command:

helm install elasticsearch elastic/elasticsearch -n dapr-monitoring --set persistence.enabled=false,replicas=1

Install Kibana

helm install kibana elastic/kibana -n dapr-monitoring

Validation

Ensure Elastic Search and Kibana are running in your Kubernetes cluster.

kubectl get pods -n dapr-monitoring
NAME                            READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
elasticsearch-master-0          1/1     Running   0          6m58s
kibana-kibana-95bc54b89-zqdrk   1/1     Running   0          4m21s

Install Fluentd

Install config map and Fluentd as a daemonset

Download these config files:

Note: If you already have Fluentd running in your cluster, please enable the nested json parser to parse JSON formatted log from Dapr.

Apply the configurations to your cluster:

kubectl apply -f ./fluentd-config-map.yaml
kubectl apply -f ./fluentd-dapr-with-rbac.yaml

Ensure that Fluentd is running as a daemonset; the number of instances should be the same as the number of cluster nodes. In the example below we only have 1 node.

kubectl get pods -n kube-system -w
NAME                          READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
coredns-6955765f44-cxjxk      1/1     Running   0          4m41s
coredns-6955765f44-jlskv      1/1     Running   0          4m41s
etcd-m01                      1/1     Running   0          4m48s
fluentd-sdrld                 1/1     Running   0          14s

Install Dapr with JSON formatted logs

Install Dapr with enabling JSON-formatted logs

helm repo add dapr https://dapr.github.io/helm-charts/
helm repo update
helm install dapr dapr/dapr --namespace dapr-system --set global.logAsJson=true

Enable JSON formatted log in Dapr sidecar

Add dapr.io/log-as-json: "true" annotation to your deployment yaml.

Example:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: pythonapp
  namespace: default
  labels:
    app: python
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: python
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: python
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true"
        dapr.io/app-id: "pythonapp"
        dapr.io/log-as-json: "true"
...

Search logs

Note: Elastic Search takes a time to index the logs that Fluentd sends.

Port-forward to svc/kibana-kibana

$ kubectl port-forward svc/kibana-kibana 5601 -n dapr-monitoring
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:5601 -> 5601
Forwarding from [::1]:5601 -> 5601
Handling connection for 5601
Handling connection for 5601