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New Home Lab Part 3: Observability

Posted on 3 mins read

My new home lab is getting close to having the core setup complete. I want to run an observability platform in my home lab for learning so I took a brief hiatus on the home lab work to create two addons for MicroK8s. The first addon is one for OpenTelemetry and the other addon is for OpenObserve. You can find these addons in my new addons repository here. I showed how those are installed in the blog posts about each addon. I need to update my launch configuration to reflect these two new addons as part of the bootstrapping process.

version: 0.2.0
addonRepositories:
  - name: phillipsj
    url: https://github.com/phillipsj/microk8s-addons
    reference: main
addons:
  - name: dns
  - name: rbac
  - name: ingress
  - name: hostpath-storage
  - name: cert-manager
  - name: dashboard
  - name: registry
  - name: metallb
    args: [192.168.1.231-192.168.1.245]
  - name: phillipsj/opentelemetry-operator
  - name: phillipsj/openobserve
extraKubeAPIServerArgs:
  --authorization-mode: RBAC,Node
extraKubeletArgs:
  --cluster-dns: 10.152.183.10
  --cluster-domain: cluster.local

With the cluster bootstrapped with this new config, I now have the OpenTelemetry-Operator running in my cluster and the OpenObserve platform. Now I need to expose my OpenObserve dashboard, fortunately, I went through the trouble configuring MetalLB, so I will put it to use. I only need to create a service of type LoadBalancer and assign it an IP from the pool of IPs I defined in my launch configuration. I get the selector label from my OpenObserve installation and that is all that is required.

Here is what that service looks like:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: openobserve-lb
  namespace: openobserve
  annotations:
    metallb.universe.tf/address-pool: default-addresspool
spec:
  selector:
    app: openobserve
  type: LoadBalancer
  loadBalancerIP: 192.168.1.231
  ports:
    - name: http
      protocol: TCP
      port: 80
      targetPort: 5080

Now I can navigate to that IP address and I should see the OpenObserve dashboard. I’m not stopping here though as a consistent reader of this blog is going to know that I don’t like using IP addresses, I much prefer using human-readable names. So I went into my DNS servers that I set up and added an A record that mapped the IP address to dashboard.home.arpa. Now I can easily get to the dashboard without having to remember IP addresses.

Here is the current state of my cluster:

$ kubectl get pods -A
NAMESPACE                NAME                                         READY   STATUS    RESTARTS        AGE
cert-manager             cert-manager-cainjector-fd9bf654b-wf6gm      1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
cert-manager             cert-manager-ff4b94468-fdlgs                 1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
cert-manager             cert-manager-webhook-7749797f6-smdth         1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
container-registry       registry-579865c76c-qxczs                    1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
ingress                  nginx-ingress-microk8s-controller-8fp4m      1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
kube-system              calico-kube-controllers-5947598c79-fpwz2     1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
kube-system              calico-node-tjtgc                            1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
kube-system              coredns-79b94494c7-n2g9s                     1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
kube-system              dashboard-metrics-scraper-5bd45c9dd6-fsvr5   1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
kube-system              hostpath-provisioner-c778b7559-rjxqx         1/1     Running   7 (5d15h ago)   44d
kube-system              kubernetes-dashboard-57bc5f89fb-9wglp        1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
kube-system              metrics-server-7dbd8b5cc9-vggkd              1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
metallb-system           controller-7ffc454778-v4r68                  1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
metallb-system           speaker-g86j5                                1/1     Running   5 (5d15h ago)   44d
openobserve              openobserve-0                                1/1     Running   0               5d15h
opentelemetry-operator   opentelemetry-operator-64dc8845fd-2pcnb      2/2     Running   8 (5d15h ago)   34d

The remaining item is to set up the cluster and host level telemetry which will be coming shortly.

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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