Definition

what’s kubewatch ?

kubewatch is a Kubernetes watcher that currently publishes notification to Slack. Deploy it in your k8s cluster, and you will get event notifications in a slack channel.

Lets see how we can deploy it to our cluster.

Pre-requisites :

  • Kubernetes 1.12+ cluster
  • Helm v3
  • A slack app and a channel to integrate kubewatch

Steps

  1. Add Bitnami repo to your helm :
helm repo add bitnami https://charts.bitnami.com/bitnami
  1. Verify that kubewatch chart is available in the repo :
demo> helm search repo kubewatch
NAME                    CHART VERSION   APP VERSION     DESCRIPTION
bitnami/kubewatch       3.2.16          0.1.0           Kubewatch

  1. Customize the values like slack integration and enabling RBAC. If you directly do helm install chart-name you wont get any event notification as RBAC is set to false by default kin the helm chart.

  2. Run the below command to get the values.yaml to local :

helm show values bitnami/kubewatch > updated-values.yaml

Now edit the yaml file as per your requirement. Here’s what I’ve changed :

Slack Integration :

slack:
enabled: true
channel: "kubewatch"           #your slack channel name
## Create using: https://my.slack.com/services/new/bot and invite the bot to your channel using: /join @botname
##
token: "your slack bot token here"

Enable RBAC:

## @section RBAC parameters
## @param rbac.create Whether to create   use RBAC resources or not
##
rbac:
  create: true
  1. Now lets deploy using the below command :
 helm install kubewatch bitnami/kubewatch -f ./updated-values.yaml
  1. Verify that kubewatch pod is running :
demo> kubectl get pod
  
NAME       READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
kubewatch-c86656645-8znwk 1/1 Running 0 2m19s
  1. To test it out, lets create a nginx deployment with command :
kubectl create deploy nginx --image=nginx
  1. Check your slack channel for notifications :

The indication is as follows :

  • Green : for resources created
  • Yellow : for resources updated
  • Red : for resources deleted

You can customize the notification a lot, for example, which namespace to monitor to ( default value is all namespace) , which resource to monitor to like deployment, pod, PV, service etc.

You can just edit the configmap : kubewatch-config and change the resources to monitor.

Happy monitoring !!!