Monitor Tanzu Mission Control

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 VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly known as 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 VMware Aria Operations for Applications:

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

In your product cluster, Generate a Service Account API Token for Tanzu Mission Control.

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

In the Tanzu Mission Control console: Select Administration > Accounts. Click Create Account Credential and select Tanzu Observability credential.
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 product instance in the credential name. Do NOT use the name of the service account. Tanzu Observability URL. The URL of your product cluster, for example, https://demo.wavefront.com Tanzu Observability API Token. The API token that you generated inside your product instance.
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.

Enable Operations for Applications for a Cluster in Tanzu Mission Control

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

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

You can now click the link to VMware Aria Operations for Applications. You are redirected to a dashboard in the VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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 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 .

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.
If you want to customize the charts in the dashboards or add more charts, you can clone the existing dashboard: Select Clone from the ellipsis menu in the top right. Give the cloned dashboard a new name and click OK. You must have the Dashboards permission inside VMware Aria Operations for Applications to clone or edit a dashboard.

Troubleshooting

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

Integrations Tile Shows Needs Attention

Symptom

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.

Possible 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 VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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.

Cannot Modify Proxy (Installed Through Tanzu Mission Control)

Symptom

You’re monitoring your Kubernetes cluster with VMware Aria Operations for Applications. You installed VMware Aria Operations for Applications from Tanzu Mission Control. Now you’re having problems making a change to the Wavefront proxy.

Cause

If you installed VMware Aria Operations for Applications from Tanzu Mission Control, you cannot make changes to the Wavefront proxy.

Remediation

If your environment has a standalone VMware Aria Operations for Applications instance, use that instance. We are working on resolving the issue.

Learn More

• Watch the videos in the Getting Started playlist on VMware TV.
• Explore Your Data in the predefined Kubernetes dashboards.
• Clone any of the predefined dashboards and customize them.
• Learn how to Monitor and Scale Kubernetes.
• Learn more about Kubernetes Troubleshooting.