Prometheus & Grafana Monitoring Stack on TKGS workload cluster in vSphere with Tanzu

In this post, we are going to build on the work already done when we deployed Carvel packages on a Tanzu Kubernetes workload cluster created by the TKG Service in vSphere with Tanzu. We saw in that post what the requirements are, how to use the tanzu command line to set context to a workload cluster, add the TKG v1.4 package repository. We also saw how to use the tanzu CLI to deploy our first package, which was cert manager. We will now continue with the deployment of a number of other packages, such as Contour (for Ingress), External-DNS (to…

Deploying a monitoring stack (Prometheus and Grafana) on TKG v1.4 with External-DNS

Many customers who have deployed Tanzu Kubernetes would like to monitor activity on the cluster. In TKG v1.4, VMware provides all of the packages one would required to setup a full monitoring stack using Prometheus and Grafana. Prometheus records real-time metrics and Grafana provides charts, graphs, and alerts when connected to a supported data source, such as Prometheus. Prometheus has a dependency on an Ingress, which we will provide through the Contour controller package (which includes an Envoy Ingress). In fact, Prometheus leverages a special kind of Ingress called a HTTPProxy which is provided with Contour. We are also going…

Securing application Ingress access on TKG v1.4 with Cert Manager and Contour

In this article, I will walk through the steps involved in securing application Ingress access on TKG v1.4. To achieve this, I will use 2 packages that are available with TKG v1.4, Cert Manager and Contour. We will deploy a sample application kuard – Kubernetes Up and Running demo, and show how we can use these packages to automatically generated certificates to establish trust between our client (browser) and the application (kuard) which will be accessed via an Ingress. For the purposes of this article, I will create my own local Certificate Authority. If you have access to a valid…