MetalK8s UI adaptation

MetalK8s UI needs adaptation, so that it fits with shell & microfrontends architecture. In the long term, MetalK8s UI always runs with a Shell Nav bar. MetalK8s also provides a secondary lateral Nav bar.

The MetalK8s secondary lateral Nav bar should contains entries that are specific to MetalK8s micro application. Features like login/logout, switching from dark to light mode or switching language are to be exposed in the Shell Nav bar.

The MetalK8s UI exposes MetalK8s operations to users having Platform Administrator role. It also provides High Level Monitoring and Alerting views in order for the Platform Administrator to understand the health and the performances of the platform.

The platform entities to operate and monitor are:

  • the Hardware entities (servers, disks, raids, interfaces or Network)

  • the OS and k8s system services (kubelet and conatinerd)

  • the Kubernetes services (etcd, apiserver, scheduler)

  • the Kubernetes entities (Nodes, Volumes)

  • the specific MetalK8s services (Monitoring, Alerting, Logging, Authentication, Ingress)

MetalK8s Operations

  • Cluster administration (upgrade, downgrade, backup, restore)

  • Cluster nodes provisioning (adding/removing nodes, configuring nodes)

  • Volume provisioning (adding/removing Volumes, configuring volumes)

  • Solution lifecycle (adding/deleting envs, activate/adding solutions)

  • MetalK8s services administration (configuring alerts, scaling service)

  • roles and security policies management

Some of the operations are not exposed through API and thus cannot be exposed in the UI. The operations that are accessible in the UI are served through either K8S or Salt APIs. Not all operations are critical to have in the UI.

Some operations, such as cluster expansion or volume addition can be time consuming. MetalK8s UI should provide some indication of the progress and ETA. It should also provide easy way to debug and investigate when things go wrong. Thus logs associated to an expansion or volume provisioning should be easily accessible from MetalK8s UI.

Last but not least, all important operations performed on the platform (such as adding/removing a node, upgrading the cluster, …) should be logged. Browsing the history of those operations should be accessible from MetalK8s UI.

MetalK8s Monitoring

Health

The Health of the system as well as the health of any specific entity of the system, is determined by the existence of an active alert, with a specific severity on it. It is probably needed to filter out some alerts that must not be taken in account to determine the health of any system entity.

The Global health of the platform is either a magic combination of some important entity alerts, either a specific Scality alert delivered with MetalK8s.

Performance

Some perf kpis & charts are available for each entity or group of entities. The aim of those charts is not to replace the Grafana dashboards but to give some high level and synthetic views, focused on what’s matter the most for the MetalK8s Platform administrator.

MetalK8s Pages

Overview / Landing Page

As a Platform Administrator, I Want to visualize the key components and services of the platform, In order to understand how the platform works.

As a Platform Administrator, I Want to identify real time and past failures, In order to act on it and fix the it.

As a Platform Administrator, I Want to visualize high level performances of the key HW components, In order to understand real time and past load as well as forecast the load.

When landing on the MetalK8s microapp, an overview of the health and performances of the cluster is displayed. The page is focusing on one single cluster i.e. one single site.

The page is divided in 3 sections:

  • global health: the history of alerts and the current health of the system. If the health of the system is degraded, when the Platform Administrator click on it, he is redirected to the alert page which is automatically filtered on the active alerts.

  • health of each platform entities: nodes, volumes, k8s master services, monitoring services, logging service, ingress services and auth service. if one entity is not healthy, we can click on it and access the list of active alerts associated with this entity, in the entity page.

  • performances: several charts are displayed to show aggregated load, aggregated CPU usage, aggregated RAM usage, aggregated IOPS usage and aggregated throughput for both CP and WP networks. Ideally, Top 10 slowest disks are also displayed.

    ../../_images/overview.jpg

Nodes Page

As a Platform Administrator, I Want to have a list of the nodes making the cluster as well as detailed information about each node, including node health, in order to identify nodes at risk.

The Nodes Page provides a list of all MetalK8s cluster nodes. For each node, one can see its status and health (most severe active alert), MetalK8s version and roles. It is also from where the Platform Administrator can expand the cluster (i.e. add a node) or access to advanced details about this node.

The list of MetalK8s cluster nodes can be displayed as a table in a first iteration but ideally, they are displayed as cards and the nodes having issues are displayed first. In both cases, a search field is available in order to filter the list of nodes we see in the table or as cards.

When the Platform Administrator click on a node, detailed information of this node is displayed in the right zone of the page (could be bottom zone). That way, the Platform Administrator can focus on one specific node while keeping the table or the cards as a way to navigate to another node.

Node Panel

When clicking on one node in the nodes page, it is possible to access various information about the node through specific tabs.

High level Node information contains its name, its ip, its role, its status. Those High level information are always visible, whatever tab is active.

  • health

  • volumes

  • pods

The health is the tab displayed at first when accessing the node.

health

The list of active and past alerts as well as Key performance indicators over the last 7 days help the Platform Administrator to understand the behaviour of this specific node. Alert table: Name, instance, Severity, Message, Active Since KPIs charts: CPU, Load, Memory, IOPS, WP and CP IO bandwidth. The list of KPI may be different for K8s master nodes and K8s worker nodes.

volumes

A table with the list of Volumes created on this node. For each volume, status, health, bounded / available, type and size is available. When clicking on one Volume, it is possible to access various information about this specific Volume in the Volume page.

pods

A table with the list of pods scheduled on this node. For each pod, status, health, age, namespace are displayed.

../../_images/nodes-view.jpg

Note

The Node Panel is also where the node creation form would be displayed when the platform administrator clicks on Add Node.

Volumes Page

The Volumes page contains a table with all provisioned Volumes into the system. This view enables to quickly identify the Volumes that are not yet bound to any pod or workload (those Volumes should appear within a dedicated section if they are displayed as cards). It also gives an overview of all created Volumes and their health and status. From the Volumes page it is possible to create a new Volume.

Volumes Table Columns:

  • Name

  • Node

  • Storage class

  • Bound: no or pod name if bound

  • Status: Available of Failed (if Volume provisioning failed)

  • Health: based on active alert existence

  • Size (or storage capacity)

  • Usage (%utilization) with some gauge bar renderer

  • Creation time

  • Action (delete/edit) with some icon renderer

Ideally we also want to have avg latency so that we can easily sort Volumes by latency in order to quickly identify slowest disks. If it is too much information to put in the table, we can have another table with only Name, Node, Health and latency information at the bottom of the main volumes table.

Note

One of the duty of the Platform Administrator is also to have a view of the available disks or devices out of which we could create Volumes / PVs. The Platform Administrator will want to know what are the available devices and if they are healthy. Also when a disk is not healthy, the Platform Administrator will want this disk to be easily identified in the data center (i.e. blinking the disk)

Volume Panel

When clicking on one volume in the volumes page, it is possible to access various information about the volume through specific tabs:

  • All table infos

  • Labels

  • Type (block device or loop device)

  • Pod name (if the volume is bound)

High level Volume information contains its name, the node it belongs to, its status, the pod it is bound to. Those High level information are always visible, whatever tab is active.

  • health

health

The list of active and past alerts as well as Key performance indicators over the last 7 days help the Platform Administrator to understand the behaviour of this specific node. Alert table: Name, instance, Severity, Message, Active Since KPIs charts: Usage (used, total, available), IOPS, IO Latency and IO bandwidth.

../../_images/volumes-view.jpg

Note

The Volume Panel is also where the volume creation form would be displayed when the platform administrator clicks on Add Volume.

Cards vs Table for Nodes ad Volumes

Cards offer a more sexy way of presenting instances. We can even layout or group cards according to some business logic criteria. However we can’t display lot of information or sort the cards. The table is may be less fancy, however it helps the user to visualize lot of information at the same time, it usually embeds out of the box sorting, filtering and top 10 capabilities. Also each cell can be rendered using fancy components (an not only text).

MetalK8s services

As a reminder, the list of MetalK8s services are the following:

  • k8s master

  • bootstrap (OCI registry & salt)

  • monitoring

  • logging

  • ingress

  • auth

As a Platform Administrator, I want to make sure all MetalK8s services are running properly, in order to make sure Solution instances can run properly and other admin users can perform their tasks.

As a Platform Administrator I want to understand on which nodes, each service sub components are scheduled and what are the Volumes involved if any, In order to know HW entities that may have an impact on it.

As an example, monitoring service is made of Prometheus to store all statistics as well as Alert Manager to manage the alerts.

As a Platform Administrator I want to know if there are some actives alerts on a service and I want to visualize the history of alerts In order to act on it to fix the issue.

As a Platform Administrator I want to to know how a service is behaving in terms of performances (CPU, Load, Memory, IO), In order to anticipate potential failure events.

As a Platform Administrator, I want to scale up/down one service, In order to better handle the load.

The Platform Administrator may also need dedicated pages in order to configure the various services (mainly thinking about alerting, auth and ingress)

Environment & solution Page

As a Platform administrator I want to create an MK8s environment (production / Staging / Test…) in order to install the Scality data and storage management solutions

As a Storage administrator I want to add and manage solution lifecycle within an environment in order to upgrade/downgrade the Scality data and storage management solutions components.

In the long term, those functionalities may need to be exposed outside of metalK8s, especially if we need to deploy environment and solutions across multiple cluster or sites.

System Settings Page

No detailed functionalities for now. This could be from where the Platform Administrator would trigger platform upgrade, downgrade, restore or backup.

Alerts Page

From this page the Platform Administrator can visualize all past and current alerts belonging to any entity of the platform. When clicking on one specific alert, the user is redirected the specific entity / health page on which the alert was fired.

Overall Navigation

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