check_rancher2 1.11.0 released: Allow ignoring specific workloads, treat provisioning cluster differently

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on January 10th 2023 - Listed in Docker Kubernetes Rancher Internet Cloud Monitoring

A new version of check_rancher2, a monitoring plugin for Kubernetes cluster managed by SUSE Rancher, is now available! Version 1.11.0 has a new enhancement and also a fix.

Enhancement: Allow ignoring specific workloads

When doing a mass-check of all workloads within a project, you might come across some broken workloads. Of course, no workload should be broken, but there could be a known error, waiting for a fix, waiting for a developer to come back from vacation, ... who knows. In the following example I came across a specific workload always restarting itself:

$ ./check_rancher2.sh -H rancher.example.com -U token-xxxxx -P secret -S -t workload -p c-xxxxx:p-xxxxx
CHECK_RANCHER2 WARNING - 1 workload(s) in warning state: Workload efk-filebeat is updating - |'workloads_total'=3;;;; 'workloads_errors'=0;;;; 'workloads_warnings'=1;;;; 'workloads_paused'=0;;;; 'workloads_ignored'=0;;;;

Although the developers were informed about this alert and of the reason (container limits not sufficient), the workload was still not fixed. As this workload is not considered production critical, from a monitoring perspective this is just annoying. You might get used to this "always warning" state and might not see a production workload joining the efk-filebeat workload.

This is why the new version now allows to use the existing -i / --ignore parameter to not only ignore a certain workload status (such as updating), but ignore a specific workload:

$ ./check_rancher2.sh -H rancher.example.com -U token-xxxxx -P secret -S -t workload -p c-xxxxx:p-xxxxx  -i efk-filebeat
CHECK_RANCHER2 OK - All workloads (3) in project c-xxxxx:p-xxxxx are healthy/active - Workload efk-filebeat is ignored -|'workloads_total'=3;;;; 'workloads_errors'=0;;;; 'workloads_warnings'=0;;;; 'workloads_paused'=0;;;; 'workloads_ignored'=1;;;;

The check_rancher2 plugin now exists with OK but mentions the efk-filebeat workload specifically in the output (so you won't forget about it being ignored).

Multiple workloads can be ignored using a comma separation. For example:

-i "efk-filebeat,another-workload,yetanother-workload-name"

The documentation of check_rancher2 has been updated accordingly.

Fix: Do not treat a provisioning cluster as CRITICAL alert

As mentioned by Steffen Eichler, a cluster currently being provisioned should not cause a CRITICAL alert and it totally makes sense. The original idea (in PR #39) was to handle this state as OK. However I have already seen some Kubernetes clusters stuck in provisioning state; the status would then remain provisioning. You definitely want to know that something's stuck so the plugin will now alert with a WARNING instead of a CRITICAL. As the provisioning of a cluster shouldn't take much longer than a few minutes (seen up to 30mins in some scenarios), the alert should clear once the cluster finished and changed to active/healthy.

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