Azure Monitor Container Insights for Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters

Azure Monitor Container Insights provides rich monitoring experience for Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters.

Supported configurations

• Azure Monitor Container Insights supports monitoring Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes as described in the Overview article, except the live data feature. Also, users aren't required to have Owner permissions to enable metrics
• Docker, Moby, and CRI compatible container runtimes such CRI-O and containerd.
• Outbound proxy without authentication and outbound proxy with basic authentication are supported. Outbound proxy that expects trusted certificates is currently not supported.

Prerequisites

• You've met the pre-requisites listed under the generic cluster extensions documentation.

• A Log Analytics workspace: Azure Monitor Container Insights supports a Log Analytics workspace in the regions listed under Azure products by region page. You can create your own workspace through Azure Resource Manager, PowerShell, or Azure portal.

• You need to have Contributor role assignment on the Azure subscription containing the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes resource. If the Log Analytics workspace is in a different subscription, then Log Analytics Contributor role assignment is needed on the Log Analytics workspace.

• To view the monitoring data, you need to have Log Analytics Reader role assignment on the Log Analytics workspace.

• The following endpoints need to be enabled for outbound access in addition to the ones mentioned under connecting a Kubernetes cluster to Azure Arc.

  Endpoint	Port
  *.ods.opinsights.azure.com	443
  *.oms.opinsights.azure.com	443
  dc.services.visualstudio.com	443
  *.monitoring.azure.com	443
  login.microsoftonline.com	443

  If your Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes resource is in Azure US Government environment, following endpoints need to be enabled for outbound access:

  Endpoint	Port
  *.ods.opinsights.azure.us	443
  *.oms.opinsights.azure.us	443
  dc.services.visualstudio.com	443

• If you had previously deployed Azure Monitor Container Insights on this cluster using script without cluster extensions, follow the instructions listed here to delete this Helm chart. You can then continue to creating a cluster extension instance for Azure Monitor Container Insights.

Identify workspace resource ID

Run the following commands to locate the full Azure Resource Manager identifier of the Log Analytics workspace.

1. List all the subscriptions that you have access to using the following command:

   az account list --all -o table
   

2. Switch to the subscription hosting the Log Analytics workspace using the following command:

   az account set -s <subscriptionId of the workspace>
   

3. The following example displays the list of workspaces in your subscriptions in the default JSON format.

   az resource list --resource-type Microsoft.OperationalInsights/workspaces -o json
   

   In the output, find the workspace name of interest. The id field of that represents the Azure Resource Manager identifier of that Log Analytics workspace.

   Tip

   This id can also be found in the Overview blade of the Log Analytics workspace through the Azure portal.

Create extension instance using Azure CLI

Option 1 - With default values

This option uses the following defaults:

• Creates or uses existing default log analytics workspace corresponding to the region of the cluster
• Auto-upgrade is enabled for the Azure Monitor cluster extension

az k8s-extension create --name azuremonitor-containers --cluster-name <cluster-name> --resource-group <resource-group> --cluster-type connectedClusters --extension-type Microsoft.AzureMonitor.Containers

Option 2 - With existing Azure Log Analytics workspace

You can use an existing Azure Log Analytics workspace in any subscription on which you have Contributor or a more permissive role assignment.

az k8s-extension create --name azuremonitor-containers --cluster-name <cluster-name> --resource-group <resource-group> --cluster-type connectedClusters --extension-type Microsoft.AzureMonitor.Containers --configuration-settings logAnalyticsWorkspaceResourceID=<armResourceIdOfExistingWorkspace>

Option 3 - With advanced configuration

If you want to tweak the default resource requests and limits, you can use the advanced configurations settings:

az k8s-extension create --name azuremonitor-containers --cluster-name <cluster-name> --resource-group <resource-group> --cluster-type connectedClusters --extension-type Microsoft.AzureMonitor.Containers --configuration-settings  omsagent.resources.daemonset.limits.cpu=150m omsagent.resources.daemonset.limits.memory=600Mi omsagent.resources.deployment.limits.cpu=1 omsagent.resources.deployment.limits.memory=750Mi

Checkout the resource requests and limits section of Helm chart for the available configuration settings.

Option 4 - On Azure Stack Edge

If the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster is on Azure Stack Edge, then a custom mount path /home/data/docker needs to be used.

az k8s-extension create --name azuremonitor-containers --cluster-name <cluster-name> --resource-group <resource-group> --cluster-type connectedClusters --extension-type Microsoft.AzureMonitor.Containers --configuration-settings omsagent.logsettings.custommountpath=/home/data/docker

Create extension instance using Azure portal

Onboarding from the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes resource blade

1. In the Azure portal, select the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster that you wish to monitor.

2. Select the 'Insights' item under the 'Monitoring' section of the resource blade.

3. On the onboarding page, select the 'Configure Azure Monitor' button

4. You can now choose the Log Analytics workspace to send your metrics and logs data to.

5. Select the 'Configure' button to deploy the Azure Monitor Container Insights cluster extension.

Onboarding from Azure Monitor blade

1. In the Azure portal, navigate to the 'Monitor' blade, and select the 'Containers' option under the 'Insights' menu.

2. Select the 'Unmonitored clusters' tab to view the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes clusters that you can enable monitoring for.

3. Click on the 'Enable' link next to the cluster that you want to enable monitoring for.

4. Choose the Log Analytics workspace and select the 'Configure' button to continue.

Create extension instance using Azure Resource Manager

1. Download Azure Resource Manager template and parameter:

   curl -L https://aka.ms/arc-k8s-azmon-extension-arm-template -o arc-k8s-azmon-extension-arm-template.json
   curl -L https://aka.ms/arc-k8s-azmon-extension-arm-template-params -o  arc-k8s-azmon-extension-arm-template-params.json
   

2. Update parameter values in arc-k8s-azmon-extension-arm-template-params.json file. For Azure public cloud, opinsights.azure.com needs to be used as the value of workspaceDomain and for AzureUSGovernment, opinsights.azure.us needs to be used as the value of workspaceDomain.

3. Deploy the template to create Azure Monitor Container Insights extension

   az login
   az account set --subscription "Subscription Name"
   az deployment group create --resource-group <resource-group> --template-file ./arc-k8s-azmon-extension-arm-template.json --parameters @./arc-k8s-azmon-extension-arm-template-params.json
   

Verify extension installation status

Once you have successfully created the Azure Monitor extension for your Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster, you can additionally check the status of installation using the Azure portal or CLI. Successful installations should show the status as 'Installed'. If your status is showing 'Failed' or remains in the 'Pending' state for long periods of time, proceed to the Troubleshooting section below.

Azure portal

1. In the Azure portal, select the Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster with the extension installing
2. Select the 'Extensions' item under the 'Settings' section of the resource blade
3. You should see an extension with the name 'azuremonitor-containers' listed, with the listed status in the 'Install status' column

Azure CLI

Run the following command to show the latest status of the Microsoft.AzureMonitor.Containers extension

az k8s-extension show --name azuremonitor-containers --cluster-name <cluster-name> --resource-group <resource-group> --cluster-type connectedClusters -n azuremonitor-containers

Delete extension instance

The following command only deletes the extension instance, but doesn't delete the Log Analytics workspace. The data within the Log Analytics resource is left intact.

az k8s-extension delete --name azuremonitor-containers --cluster-type connectedClusters --cluster-name <cluster-name> --resource-group <resource-group>

Disconnected cluster

If your cluster is disconnected from Azure for > 48 hours, then Azure Resource Graph won't have information about your cluster. As a result the Insights blade may display incorrect information about your cluster state.

Troubleshooting

For issues with enabling monitoring, we have provided a troubleshooting script to help diagnose any problems.

Next steps

• With monitoring enabled to collect health and resource utilization of your Azure Arc-enabled Kubernetes cluster and workloads running on them, learn how to use Container insights.

• By default, the containerized agent collects the stdout/ stderr container logs of all the containers running in all the namespaces except kube-system. To configure container log collection specific to particular namespace or namespaces, review Container Insights agent configuration to configure desired data collection settings to your ConfigMap configurations file.

• To scrape and analyze Prometheus metrics from your cluster, review Configure Prometheus metrics scraping