Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) allows you to use Application Real-Time Monitoring Service (ARMS) to monitor Java applications that are deployed in clusters. ARMS can automatically discover application topologies, generate 3D topologies, discover and monitor API endpoints, and detect abnormal and slow transactions. ARMS provides an efficient method to diagnose and troubleshoot application issues.

Prerequisites

Background information

ARMS is an application performance management (APM) service of Alibaba Cloud. After you install the ARMS application monitoring agent in an ACK cluster, you can use ARMS to monitor Java applications in the cluster without code modifications. ARMS allows you to quickly locate abnormal and slow transactions, reproduce the parameters of API calls, detect memory leaks, and discover system bottlenecks. This significantly improves the efficiency of diagnosing and troubleshooting application issues. For more information, see Overview.

Step 1: Install the ARMS application monitoring agent

  1. Log on to the ACK console.
  2. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Marketplace > Marketplace. On the App Catalog tab, perform a keyword search for ack-onepilot, and then click the agent card.
  3. On the ack-onepilot page, click Deploy in the upper-right corner.
  4. In the Deploy panel, select the cluster and namespace where you want to install the agent, enter the release name for the agent, and then click Next.
  5. Click OK.

Step 2: Grant the cluster the permissions to access ARMS

  • To monitor applications in an ASK cluster or applications in a Kubernetes cluster connected to Elastic Container Instance (ECI), you must first authorize the cluster to access ARMS on the Cloud Resource Access Authorization page. Then, restart all pods on which the ack-onepilot agent is deployed.
  • If you want to monitor applications in an ACK cluster but the ACK cluster has no ARMS Addon Token, perform the following operations to authorize the ACK cluster to access ARMS.
    Note

    For more information about how to check whether a ARMS Addon Token exists, see Check whether a cluster has ARMS Addon Token.

    If a cluster has ARMS Addon Token, ARMS performs password-free authorization on the cluster. ARMS Addon Token may not exist in some ACK managed clusters. We recommend that you check whether an ACK managed cluster has ARMS Addon Token before you use ARMS to monitor applications in the cluster. If the cluster has no ARMS Addon Token, you must manually authorize the cluster to access ARMS.

    1. Log on to the ACK console.
    2. In the left-side navigation pane, click Clusters. On the Clusters page, find the cluster in which your application is deployed . Click the cluster name or click Details in the Actions column.
    3. On the details page of the cluster, click the Cluster Resources tab. On the Cluster Resources tab, click the hyperlink next to Worker RAM Role. Worker RAM Link
    4. You are redirected to the Roles page in the RAM console. On the Roles page, click the policy name on the Permissions tab.
    5. On the Policy Document tab, click Modify Policy Document.
    6. On the Modify Policy page, add the following content and click Next to edit basic information.
      {
         "Action": "arms:*",
         "Resource": "*",
         "Effect": "Allow"
      }
      Modify RAM Authorization
    7. Check the policy content and click OK.

Step 3: Enable ARMS to monitor Java applications

To enable ARMS when you create an application, perform the following steps:

  1. Log on to the ACK console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Clusters. On the Clusters page, find the cluster that you want to manage and click Applications in the Actions column.
  2. On the Deployments page, click Create from YAML in the upper-right corner of the page.
  3. On the Create page, select a template from the Sample Template drop-down list and add the following labels to the spec.template.metadata section in the Template code editor.
    labels:
      armsPilotAutoEnable: "on"
      armsPilotCreateAppName: "<your-deployment-name>"    // Replace <your-deployment-name> with the name of your application. 
      one-agent.jdk.version: "OpenJDK11"
      armsSecAutoEnable: "on"    // If you want to connect the application to Application Security, you must configure this parameter. 
    Note
    YAML Example

    The following YAML template shows how to create a stateless application and enable ARMS for the application:

    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Namespace
    metadata:
      name: arms-demo
    ---
    apiVersion: apps/v1 # for versions before 1.8.0 use apps/v1beta1
    kind: Deployment
    metadata:
      name: arms-springboot-demo
      namespace: arms-demo
      labels:
        app: arms-springboot-demo
    spec:
      replicas: 2
      selector:
        matchLabels:
          app: arms-springboot-demo
      template:
        metadata:
          labels:
            app: arms-springboot-demo
            armsPilotAutoEnable: "on"
            armsPilotCreateAppName: "arms-k8s-demo"
            one-agent.jdk.version: "OpenJDK11"
        spec:
          containers:
            - resources:
                limits:
                  cpu: 0.5
              image: registry.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/arms-docker-repo/arms-springboot-demo:v0.1
              imagePullPolicy: Always
              name: arms-springboot-demo
              env:
                - name: SELF_INVOKE_SWITCH
                  value: "true"
                - name: COMPONENT_HOST
                  value: "arms-demo-component"
                - name: COMPONENT_PORT
                  value: "6666"
                - name: MYSQL_SERVICE_HOST
                  value: "arms-demo-mysql"
                - name: MYSQL_SERVICE_PORT
                  value: "3306"
    ---
    apiVersion: apps/v1 # for versions before 1.8.0 use apps/v1beta1
    kind: Deployment
    metadata:
      name: arms-springboot-demo-subcomponent
      namespace: arms-demo
      labels:
        app: arms-springboot-demo-subcomponent
    spec:
      replicas: 2
      selector:
        matchLabels:
          app: arms-springboot-demo-subcomponent
      template:
        metadata:
          labels:
            app: arms-springboot-demo-subcomponent
            armsPilotAutoEnable: "on"
            armsPilotCreateAppName: "arms-k8s-demo-subcomponent"
            one-agent.jdk.version: "OpenJDK11"
        spec:
          containers:
            - resources:
                limits:
                  cpu: 0.5
              image: registry.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/arms-docker-repo/arms-springboot-demo:v0.1
              imagePullPolicy: Always
              name: arms-springboot-demo-subcomponent
              env:
                - name: SELF_INVOKE_SWITCH
                  value: "false"
                - name: MYSQL_SERVICE_HOST
                  value: "arms-demo-mysql"
                - name: MYSQL_SERVICE_PORT
                  value: "3306"
    ---
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Service
    metadata:
      labels:
        name: arms-demo-component
      name: arms-demo-component
      namespace: arms-demo
    spec:
      ports:
        # the port that this service should serve on
        - name: arms-demo-component-svc
          port: 6666
          targetPort: 8888
      # label keys and values that must match in order to receive traffic for this service
      selector:
        app: arms-springboot-demo-subcomponent
    ---
    apiVersion: apps/v1 # for versions before 1.8.0 use apps/v1beta1
    kind: Deployment
    metadata:
      name: arms-demo-mysql
      namespace: arms-demo
      labels:
        app: mysql
    spec:
      replicas: 1
      selector:
        matchLabels:
          app: mysql
      template:
        metadata:
          labels:
            app: mysql
        spec:
          containers:
            - resources:
                limits:
                  cpu: 0.5
              image: registry.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/arms-docker-repo/arms-demo-mysql:v0.1
              name: mysql
              ports:
                - containerPort: 3306
                  name: mysql
    ---
    apiVersion: v1
    kind: Service
    metadata:
      labels:
        name: mysql
      name: arms-demo-mysql
      namespace: arms-demo
    spec:
      ports:
        # the port that this service should serve on
        - name: arms-mysql-svc
          port: 3306
          targetPort: 3306
      # label keys and values that must match in order to receive traffic for this service
      selector:
        app: mysql
    ---
    

Verify the result

On the Deployments page, find the application that you want to monitor, and check whether the ARMS Console button appears in the Actions column.

ARMS Console Button

Uninstall the ARMS agent

  1. Log on to the ACK console.
  2. In the left-side navigation pane, click Clusters. On the Clusters page, find the cluster that contains the Java application from which you want to uninstall the ARMS agent, and click Applications in the Actions column.
  3. In the left-side navigation pane, choose Applications > Helm.
  4. On the Helm page, find the release named ack-onepilot of the ARMS agent, and click Delete in the Actions column.
  5. In the Delete message, click OK.
  6. Restart your business pod.

What to do next

After you complete the preceding steps, you enable ARMS application monitoring for the application deployed in the Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes. Click ARMS Console in the Actions column of the target application. The application monitoring page of the ARMS console appears. ARMS application monitoring have the following capabilities:

1. Display the key indicators of the overall performance of the application and automatically discover the application topology.

2. The 3D topology can display the health status of applications, services, and hosts, as well as the upstream and downstream dependencies of applications, help you quickly locate the services that cause faults, applications affected by faults, and associated hosts, and diagnose the root causes of faults in all directions, so as to quickly troubleshoot faults.

3. Capture abnormal transactions and slow transactions, obtain the slow SQL, MQ accumulation analysis report or exception classification report of the interface, correct errors, slow and other common problems for more detailed analysis.

4. Automatically discover and monitor common Web frameworks and RPC frameworks in application code, and automatically count the number of calls, response time, and number of errors of Web interfaces and RPC interfaces.