Container Service for Kubernetes:Go application monitoring

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• An ACK managed or dedicated cluster. See Create an ACK managed cluster or Create an ACK dedicated cluster (discontinued)

• Go 1.18 or later in your local build environment

• ARMS activated. See Activate ARMS ARMS is an application performance management (APM) service. For more information, see What is ARMS and What is Application Monitoring.

What you get after setup

After completing the steps below, the ARMS console shows:

• Application topology — a live dependency graph of your services

• Interface calls — latency, throughput, and error rates for each HTTP/RPC endpoint

• Database analysis — slow queries and call patterns across connected databases

Step 1: Install the ack-onepilot component

1. Log on to the ACK console. In the left navigation pane, click Clusters.

2. On the Clusters page, click the cluster name. In the left navigation pane, click Add-ons.

3. In the Logs and Monitoring section, find ack-onepilot and click Install. In the dialog box, keep the default parameter values and click OK.

After installation, you can upgrade, reconfigure, or uninstall ack-onepilot from the Add-ons page.

Step 2: Authorize ARMS to access cluster resources

ACK managed clusters created recently include an addon.arms.token secret that grants ARMS password-free access automatically. If your cluster already has this secret, skip to Step 3.

Check whether the secret exists:

1. In the ACK console, click the cluster name. In the left navigation pane, choose Configurations > Secrets.

2. From the Namespace drop-down list, select kube-system.

3. Check whether addon.arms.token is listed.

If the secret is missing, grant access manually:

1. In the ACK console, click the cluster name. In the left navigation pane, click Cluster Information.

2. On the Basic Information tab, go to the Cluster Resources section and click the link next to Worker RAM Role.

3. On the Permissions tab, click Grant Permission.

4. Select the AliyunARMSFullAccess policy and click OK.

For ACK managed clusters connected to Elastic Container Instances (ECI):

Go to the RAM Quick Authorization page and complete authorization. Then restart the pods created for ack-onepilot.

Step 3: Compile your Go binary with instgo

instgo is an enhanced Go compilation tool provided by ARMS. It wraps the standard go build command and injects monitoring instrumentation at compile time — no source code modifications required.

chmod +x instgo

instgo go build {arg1} {arg2} {arg3}

Step 4: Enable ARMS monitoring for a Deployment

1. Log on to the ACK console. In the left navigation pane, click Clusters.

2. On the Clusters page, click the cluster name. In the left navigation pane, choose Workloads > Deployments.

3. In the Actions column for your application, click > Edit YAML.

4. Add the following labels to spec.template.metadata in the YAML file:

   labels:
     aliyun.com/app-language: golang        # Identifies this as a Go application
     armsPilotAutoEnable: 'on'
     armsPilotCreateAppName: "<your-deployment-name>"    # Replace with the Deployment name

   

5. Save the YAML. Kubernetes restarts the pods with the updated labels.

Step 5: View monitoring data

Wait approximately one minute for the first data to appear.

1. Log on to the ARMS console. In the left navigation pane, choose Application Monitoring > Application List. Your Go application appears in the list with reported metrics.

   

2. Click the application name to open the monitoring dashboard. For a description of available metrics, see Application overview.

Troubleshooting

If no data appears in the ARMS console after a few minutes, check the following:

(Optional) Disable monitoring

To stop monitoring the application, uninstall the ARMS agent. See Uninstall an ARMS agent for Go.

What's next

• Monitor Java applications in ACK clusters

• Monitor Python applications in ACK clusters

• Application overview — explore the full monitoring dashboard