NodeObservability Operator

Note: This Operator is in the early stages of implementation and keeps changing.

The NodeObservability Operator allows you to deploy and manage NodeObservability Agent on the worker nodes. The NodeObservability agent is deployed through DaemonSets on the selected nodes.
Afterward, the profiling requests can be created to trigger different types of profiling. The profiling data will be accessible in the root filesystem of the NodeObservability Agent.

• Deploying the NodeObservability Operator
  • Installing the NodeObservability Operator
  • Installing the NodeObservability Operator using a custom index image on the OperatorHub
• Verifying the installation of NodeObservability Operator
• Creating the NodeObservability CR

Architecture Overview

Description

The node-observability-operator once installed will create a daemonset on all or only labeled nodes, once the cluster-admin creates and deploys a CRD for nodeobservability. After ensuring all agent pods are running on the desired nodes the cluster-admin can then create a node-observability-run CRD, this will then call the API end points of all agents and trigger either a profiling or scripting execution, the profiling data/ scripting artifacts will be stored in the agent container using hostPath for later retrieval

Deploying the NodeObservability Operator

NodeObservability Operator can be deployed using one of the following procedures.

Installing the NodeObservability Operator

You can install the NodeObservability Operator by building and pushing the Operator image into a registry.

1. To build and push the Operator image into a registry, run the following commands:

   # set the envar CONTAINER_ENGINE to the preffered container manager tool (default is podman)
   export IMG=${REGISTRY}/${REPOSITORY}/node-observability-operator:${VERSION}
   make container-build container-push

2. To deploy the NodeObservability Operator, run the following command:

   make deploy
   

   To specify the custom image for the NodeObservability Agent, patch the deployment of the operator with the following command:

   oc set env deployment/node-observability-operator --containers=manager RELATED_IMAGE_AGENT=${MY_IMAGE_AGENT} -n node-observability-operator

3. The previous step deploys the conversion webhook, which requires the TLS verification on the webhook server's side. The manifests deployed through the make deploy command do not contain a valid certificate and key. You must provision a valid certificate and key through other tools.
   If you run on OpenShift, you can use a convenience script, hack/add-serving-cert.sh to enable the service serving certificate feature.
   Run the hack/add-serving-cert.sh script with the following inputs:

   hack/add-serving-cert.sh --crd "nodeobservabilities.nodeobservability.olm.openshift.io nodeobservabilitymachineconfigs.nodeobservability.olm.openshift.io" \
   --service node-observability-operator-webhook-service --secret webhook-server-cert --namespace node-observability-operator

   Note: you may need to wait for the retry of the volume mount in the operator's POD

Installing the NodeObservability Operator using a custom index image on the OperatorHub

Note: It is recommended to use podman as a container engine.

NodeObservability Operator can be installed by building and pushing the custom OLM bundle index image.

1. Build and push the Operator image to the registry:

   export IMG=${REGISTRY}/${REPOSITORY}/node-observability-operator:${VERSION}
   make container-build container-push

2. Build and push the bundle image to the registry:

   export BUNDLE_IMG=${REGISTRY}/${REPOSITORY}/node-observability-operator-bundle:${VERSION}
   make bundle-build bundle-push

3. Build and push the index image to the registry:

   export INDEX_IMG=${REGISTRY}/${REPOSITORY}/node-observability-operator-bundle-index:${VERSION}
   make index-image-build index-image-push

4. (Optional) If the image is private, then link the registry secret to the pod of the node-observability-operator created in the openshift-marketplace namespace:

   a. Create a secret with authentication details of your image registry (you have to be logged into the registry):

   oc -n openshift-marketplace create secret generic nodeobs-olm-secret --type=kubernetes.io/dockercfg --from-file=.dockercfg=${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/containers/auth.json

   b. Link the secret to the default service account:

   oc -n openshift-marketplace secrets link default nodeobs-olm-secret --for=pull

5. Create the CatalogSource object:

   cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
   apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
   kind: CatalogSource
   metadata:
     name: node-observability-operator
     namespace: openshift-marketplace
   spec:
     sourceType: grpc
     image: ${INDEX_IMG}
   EOF
   

6. Install the operator from the command line client or from the webUI:

From the CLI

1. Create the Operator namespace:

   oc create namespace node-observability-operator

2. Create the OperatorGroup object to scope the Operator to node-observability-operator namespace:

   cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
   apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1
   kind: OperatorGroup
   metadata:
     name: node-observability-operator
     namespace: node-observability-operator
   EOF
   

3. Create the Subscription object:

   cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
   apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
   kind: Subscription
   metadata:
     name: node-observability-operator
     namespace: node-observability-operator
   spec:
     channel: alpha
     name: node-observability-operator
     source: node-observability-operator
     sourceNamespace: openshift-marketplace
   EOF
   

   If you want to specify the agent image of your choice, use the following subscription:

   cat <<EOF | oc apply -f -
   apiVersion: operators.coreos.com/v1alpha1
   kind: Subscription
   metadata:
     name: node-observability-operator
     namespace: node-observability-operator
   spec:
     channel: alpha
     name: node-observability-operator
     source: node-observability-operator
     sourceNamespace: openshift-marketplace
     env:
     config:
       env:
         - name: RELATED_IMAGE_AGENT
           value: ${MY_IMAGE_AGENT}
   EOF
   

From the webUI

1. Log in to the OpenShift Container Platform web console.
2. Navigate to Operators → OperatorHub.
3. Type Node Observability Operator into the filter box and select it.
4. Click Install.
5. On the Install Operator page, select a specific namespace on the cluster. Select node-observability-operator from the drop-down menu.
6. Once finished, the Node Observability Operator will be listed in the Installed Operators section of the web console.

Verifying the installation of NodeObservability Operator

Run the following commands to verify that the Node Observability Operator has been installed:

oc -n node-observability-operator get subscription -o yaml
oc -n node-observability-operator get installplan -o yaml
oc -n node-observability-operator get deployment/node-observability-operator

Creating the NodeObservability CR

Run the following command to create an instance of NodeObservability:

oc apply -f config/samples/nodeobservability_v1alpha2_nodeobservability-all.yaml