Monitoring the DevWorkspace Operator

You can configure the OpenShift in-cluster monitoring stack to scrape metrics exposed by the DevWorkspace Operator.

Collecting DevWorkspace Operator metrics

The Che Operator automatically manages Prometheus resources to enable metric collection for the DevWorkspace Operator.

Prerequisites

Your organization’s instance of Che is installed and running in Red Hat OpenShift.
An active oc session with administrative permissions to the destination Kubernetes cluster. See Overview of kubectl.
The devworkspace-controller-metrics Service is exposing metrics on port 8443. This is preconfigured by default.

Procedure

Enable DevWorkspace Operator metrics collection by configuring the CheCluster Custom Resource:

kubectl patch checluster eclipse-che \
  --namespace eclipse-che \
  --type merge \
  --patch '{
    "spec": {
      "devEnvironments": {
        "metrics": true (1)
      }
    }
  }'

Set to true to enable metrics collection (default), or false to disable.

When spec.devEnvironments.metrics is set to true, the Che Operator automatically creates and manages the following resources:

A ServiceMonitor resource named devworkspace-controller that configures Prometheus to scrape metrics from the DevWorkspace Operator
A Role and RoleBinding that grant the prometheus-k8s service account permission to access the metrics endpoints
The openshift.io/cluster-monitoring=true label on the Che namespace to enable the in-cluster Prometheus instance to discover the ServiceMonitor

These resources are managed by the Che Operator. Manual modifications to these resources will be overwritten during reconciliation.

Verification

For a fresh installation of Che, generate metrics by creating a Che workspace from the Dashboard.
In the Administrator view of the OpenShift web console, go to Observe → Metrics.
Run a PromQL query to confirm that the metrics are available. For example, enter devworkspace_started_total and click Run queries.

For more metrics, see DevWorkspace-specific metrics.

To troubleshoot missing metrics, view the Prometheus container logs for possible RBAC-related errors:

Get the name of the Prometheus pod:

$ oc get pods -l app.kubernetes.io/name=prometheus -n openshift-monitoring -o=jsonpath='{.items[*].metadata.name}'

Print the last 20 lines of the Prometheus container logs from the Prometheus pod from the previous step:
```
$ oc logs --tail=20 <prometheus_pod_name> -c prometheus -n openshift-monitoring
```

Additional resources

DevWorkspace-specific metrics

The following tables describe the DevWorkspace-specific metrics exposed by the devworkspace-controller-metrics Service.

Table 1. Metrics
Name	Type	Description	Labels
`devworkspace_started_total`	Counter	Number of DevWorkspace starting events.	`source`, `routingclass`
`devworkspace_started_success_total`	Counter	Number of DevWorkspaces successfully entering the `Running` phase.	`source`, `routingclass`
`devworkspace_fail_total`	Counter	Number of failed DevWorkspaces.	`source`, `reason`
`devworkspace_startup_time`	Histogram	Total time taken to start a DevWorkspace, in seconds.	`source`, `routingclass`

Table 2. Labels
Name	Description	Values
`source`	The `controller.devfile.io/devworkspace-source` label of the DevWorkspace.	`string`
`routingclass`	The `spec.routingclass` of the DevWorkspace.	`"basic\|cluster\|cluster-tls\|web-terminal"`
`reason`	The workspace startup failure reason.	`"BadRequest\|InfrastructureFailure\|Unknown"`

Table 3. Startup failure reasons
Name	Description
`BadRequest`	Startup failure due to an invalid devfile used to create a DevWorkspace.
`InfrastructureFailure`	Startup failure due to the following errors: `CreateContainerError`, `RunContainerError`, `FailedScheduling`, `FailedMount`.
`Unknown`	Unknown failure reason.

Viewing DevWorkspace Operator metrics from an OpenShift web console dashboard

After configuring the in-cluster Prometheus instance to collect DevWorkspace Operator metrics, you can view the metrics on a custom dashboard in the Administrator perspective of the OpenShift web console.

Prerequisites

Your organization’s instance of Che is installed and running in Red Hat OpenShift.
An active oc session with administrative permissions to the destination OpenShift cluster. See Getting started with the CLI.
The in-cluster Prometheus instance is collecting metrics. See Collecting DevWorkspace Operator metrics.

Procedure

Create a ConfigMap for the dashboard definition in the openshift-config-managed namespace and apply the necessary label.

$ oc create configmap grafana-dashboard-dwo \
  --from-literal=dwo-dashboard.json="$(curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/devfile/devworkspace-operator/main/docs/grafana/openshift-console-dashboard.json)" \
  -n openshift-config-managed

```
$ oc label configmap grafana-dashboard-dwo console.openshift.io/dashboard=true -n openshift-config-managed
```
The dashboard definition is based on Grafana 6.x dashboards. Not all Grafana 6.x dashboard features are supported in the OpenShift web console.

Verification steps

In the Administrator view of the OpenShift web console, go to Observe → Dashboards.
Go to Dashboard → Dev Workspace Operator and verify that the dashboard panels contain data.

Dashboard for the DevWorkspace Operator

The OpenShift web console custom dashboard is based on Grafana 6.x and displays the following metrics from the DevWorkspace Operator.

Not all features for Grafana 6.x dashboards are supported as an OpenShift web console dashboard.

DevWorkspace metrics

The DevWorkspace-specific metrics are displayed in the DevWorkspace Metrics panel.

Grafana dashboard panels that contain metrics related to `DevWorkspace startup

Figure 1. The DevWorkspace Metrics panel

Average workspace start time

The average workspace startup duration.

Workspace starts

The number of successful and failed workspace startups.

DevWorkspace successes and failures

A comparison between successful and failed DevWorkspace startups.

DevWorkspace failure rate

The ratio between the number of failed workspace startups and the number of total workspace startups.

DevWorkspace startup failure reasons

A pie chart that displays the distribution of workspace startup failures:

BadRequest
InfrastructureFailure
Unknown

Operator metrics

The Operator-specific metrics are displayed in the Operator Metrics panel.

Figure 2. The Operator Metrics panel

Webhooks in flight: A comparison between the number of different webhook requests.
Work queue depth: The number of reconcile requests that are in the work queue.
Memory: Memory usage for the DevWorkspace controller and the DevWorkspace webhook server.
Average reconcile counts per second (DWO): The average per-second number of reconcile counts for the DevWorkspace controller.