Heapster for Kubernetes Dashboard Graphs

So you've just setup your Kubernetes cluster and deployed the Kubernetes Dashboard to it. You navigate to the dashboard expecting to get some info on your deployments and, more importantly, an eyeful of those sweet, sweet graphs. The dashboard loads up and you stare in utter disappointment at an endless wall of text. Why the hell does your Kubernetes dashboard not have graphs like every single screenshot you've seen? You furiously start Googling phrases like kubernetes dashboard no graphs or what's up with the lack of graphs on my kubernetes dashboard.

In short order you realize that you need to have Heapster running on your cluster in order to get those gorgeous graphs on your dashboard. The official documentation offers remarkably little help. There's no mention whatsoever of the bare minimum requirements for getting graphs on your dashboard. It's obvious that you'll need Influxdb and Heapster but do you really need Grafana? Is any special setup required to get the dashboard to "see" Heapster and start displaying those eye-meltingly beautiful graphs? Well, friends, here have you the answers that you so desperately seek:

• You only need Heapster and Influxdb - Grafana is entirely optional.
• As long as you've got Heapster exposed via a service called heapster, you're all good.

The yaml files in the Influxdb section of the official Heapster documentation will get you close to what you need but they simultaneously add some superfluous stuff and leave out a few important bits. Instead of relying on those, checkout the two yaml files in this project's deploy directory. They're exactly what you need to add a bare minimum Heapster/Influxdb deployment to your Kubernetes cluster.

To deploy Heapster and Influxdb, clone this project to a directory easily accessible by kubectl, cd into that directory and follow these simple instructions:

Create a PersistentVolume for Influxdb data

The Influxdb container is going to need a place to store its data. When applied, the deploy/influxdb.yaml file will attempt to create a PersistentVolumeClaim against a PersistentVolume whose storageClassName is influxdb. You'll need to create this PersistentVolume. Since there are many, many different ways to create persistent volumes, no template has been included in this project.

Here's an example, however, of what a PersistentVolume definition might look like if you had some theoretical NFS space available on a hypothetical NAS server:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolume
metadata:
  name: influxdb-persistent-volume
  namespace: kube-system
spec:
  capacity:
    storage: 50Gi
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  persistentVolumeReclaimPolicy: Retain
  storageClassName: influxdb
  nfs:
    path: /mnt/nfs-storage/influxdb
    server: 192.168.0.101

The important bits of the above example that you'll need to replicate in your persistent volume definition are as follows:

• It's in the kube-system namespace
• The storageClassName is influxdb

Deploy Heapster and Influxdb

Once you've got your persistent volume in place according to the above instructions, simply run the following command to deploy Heapster and Influxdb:

$ kubectl apply -f deploy/

That ought to do it. The Heapster and Influxdb deployments will spin up one pod each which'll be named something like this:

NAME                                     READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
heapster-1428305041-jp8hh                1/1       Running   0          1h
monitoring-influxdb-2825711038-v0zl6     1/1       Running   0          1h

Check the logs of these two pods to verify that they've started up without any error messages. Remember that these pods are running in the kube-system namespace so you'll need to append -n kube-system to your log commands.

If both pods are running, you should be good to go. Log into the Kubernetes Dashboard and behold those dazzling graphs that you've been desirous of for so very long.

Tearing it down

To undeploy all of this Heapster/Influxdb goodness, simply run the following command from the directory where you've cloned this project:

$ kubectl delete -f deploy/