Monitoring NGINX Ingress Controller with VTS metrics (deprecated) (FREE)
Deprecated in GitLab 14.7.
WARNING: This feature is in its end-of-life process. It is deprecated in GitLab 14.7, and is planned for removal in GitLab 16.0.
NOTE: NGINX Ingress version 0.16 and above have built-in Prometheus metrics, which are different than the VTS based metrics.
GitLab has support for automatically detecting and monitoring the Kubernetes NGINX Ingress controller. This is provided by leveraging the included VTS Prometheus metrics exporter in version 0.9.0 through 0.15.x.
Requirements
Prometheus integration must be active.
Metrics supported
| Name | Query |
|---|---|
| Throughput (req/sec) | sum(rate(nginx_upstream_responses_total{upstream=~"%{kube_namespace}-%{ci_environment_slug}-.*"}[2m])) by (status_code) |
| Latency (ms) | avg(nginx_upstream_response_msecs_avg{upstream=~"%{kube_namespace}-%{ci_environment_slug}-.*"}) |
| HTTP Error Rate (%) | sum(rate(nginx_upstream_responses_total{status_code="5xx", upstream=~"%{kube_namespace}-%{ci_environment_slug}-.*"}[2m])) / sum(rate(nginx_upstream_responses_total{upstream=~"%{kube_namespace}-%{ci_environment_slug}-.*"}[2m])) * 100 |
Configuring NGINX Ingress monitoring
Version 0.9.0 and above of NGINX Ingress has built-in support for exporting Prometheus metrics. To enable, a ConfigMap setting must be passed: enable-vts-status: "true". Once enabled, a Prometheus metrics endpoint begins running on port 10254.
Next, the Ingress needs to be annotated for Prometheus monitoring. Two new annotations need to be added:
prometheus.io/scrape: "true"prometheus.io/port: "10254"
Managing these settings depends on how NGINX Ingress has been deployed. If you have deployed via the official Helm chart, metrics can be enabled with controller.stats.enabled along with the required annotations. Alternatively it is possible edit the NGINX Ingress YAML directly in the Kubernetes dashboard.
Specifying the Environment label
To isolate and only display relevant metrics for a given environment, GitLab needs a method to detect which labels are associated. To do this, GitLab searches for metrics with appropriate labels. In this case, the upstream label must be of the form <KUBE_NAMESPACE>-<CI_ENVIRONMENT_SLUG>-*.
If you have used Auto Deploy to deploy your app, this format is used automatically and metrics are detected with no action on your part.