Monitor clusters in Tanzu Mission Control using Tanzu Observability by Wavefront.

VMware Tanzu Mission Control provides a centralized management platform for consistently operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across multiple teams and clouds.

This document explains

  • How to set up and enable the integration from Tanzu Mission Control to Tanzu Observability by Wavefront.
  • How to monitor your Kubernetes environment with our pre-defined dashboards, and how to clone and customize those dashboards.
  • How to troubleshoot common problems.

Create the Credential

To get started, you set up the integration from Tanzu Mission Control to Tanzu Observability by Wavefront:

Step 1: In Your Wavefront Cluster, Generate an API Token

In your Wavefront cluster, Generate a Service Account API Token for Tanzu Mission Control. Create service account dialog with name and description filled in.

Step 2: In Tanzu Mission Control, Set Up the Integration

In the Tanzu Mission Control console:
  1. Select Administration > Accounts.
  2. Click Create Account Credential and select Tanzu Observability credential.
 Pulldown menu shows Tanzu Observability credential as the third item
On the Create Tanzu Observability credential page, specify credential attributes:
  • Credential Name. Name that starts and ends with a letter and contains only lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens. Best practice is to include the name of the Wavefront instance in the credential name. Do NOT use the name of the service account.
  • Tanzu Observability URL. The URL of the Wavefront cluster, for example, https://demo.wavefront.com
  • Tanzu Observability API Token. The API token that you generated inside the Wavefront instance.
Create Tanzu Observability page with 3 fields filled in
Click the Integrations tab and verify that Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is enabled. If you don't see the integration as enabled after a few minutes, see the Troubleshooting section below. Screenshot shows Tanzu Observability is enabled.

Enable Tanzu Observability for a Cluster in Tanzu Mission Control

After you have set up the credential from Tanzu Mission Control, you can start enabling Tanzu Observability for individual clusters that are managed by Tanzu Mission Control.

  1. In Tanzu Mission Control, select Clusters and pick the cluster that you want to monitor.
  2. In the Integrations tile, click Add Integration and select Tanzu Observability.
  3. In the Add Tanzu Observability dialog, select the credential that is associated with the Wavefront instance that you want to use for monitoring.
  4. After a few minutes, the Integrations tile shows the Tanzu Mission Control Adapter status OK.
 Tanzu Observability Integration dialog with pulldown menu showing credentials.

Large screenshot of TMC UI with Clusters selected and Integrations tile visible

You can now click the link to Tanzu Observability. You are redirected to a dashboard in the Wavefront instance that shows the metrics for the cluster.

Examine Your Cluster’s Data in Dashboards

Dashboards allow you to drill down into your data, change the time window, examine individual charts, use filters, and much more.

Visualize Kubernetes Data with Wavefront has some specific information. For a general overview of dashboards and charts, see Examine Data with Dashboards and Charts or watch this short video. You can also watch the video here video camera icon.

The Kubernetes dashboard that you land on from Tanzu Mission Control has several sections with detailed information.

Scroll down for red flags on the dashboard, or use the Jump To menu to focus on the section you're interested in. Tanzu Observability Integration dialog with pulldown menu showing credentials.
If you want to customize the charts in the dashboards or add more charts, you can clone the existing dashboard:
  1. Select Clone from the ellipsis menu in the top right.
  2. Give the cloned dashboard a name and click OK.
You must have the Dashboards permission inside Tanzu Observability by Wavefront to clone or edit a dashboard. 		Pulldown menu shows Edit, Clone, Export to PDF

Troubleshooting

For some general recommendations, Kubernetes Troubleshooting. The following causes for failure and remediation steps are especially useful for Tanzu Mission Control troubleshooting.

Symptoms

If the integration wasn’t set up successfully, the icon in the Integrations tile shows Needs Attention and the wavefront-extension icon in the Agent and extensions health tile shows Unhealthy.
Integrations tile shows Needs Attention 		wavefront-extension icon shows Unhealthy

Causes

Failures might be caused by several issues including the following:

  • Policy restrictions (access permission for pod)
  • Nodes are not available for scheduling
  • Not enough memory or CPU is available
  • Image cannot be pulled
  • Pod crash due to internal access logic error
  • General issue on the Tanzu Mission Control side
  • Issue with credential, for example, the API token might have been revoked on the Tanzu Observability by Wavefront side.

Remediation

Follow these steps to remediate problems:

  1. Ensure that the cluster you want to connect to isn’t protected by an SSO solution. If it is, you might have to explicitly log in to the cluster as a user before you can display the dashboard.
  2. Ensure that the Wavefront API key is active and correctly entered. If the key was revoked, it’s no longer valid.

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