Mermin with NetObserv Flow and OpenSearch

• Mermin with NetObserv Flow and OpenSearch

  • Overview

  • Install

  • Access

  • Hints

Overview

This example deploys Mermin and NetObserv Flow (as OTel receiver) with OpenSearch as the data platform. Although local Kind was used for testing, any kubernetes cluster should work if nodes have sufficient resources and don't have any taints that should be tolerated (tolerations values may be used). This example is intended only for demonstration, testing, or proof-of-concept use, since OpenSearch is deployed in a single-node mode.

Notes on the example deployment:

• Location in the repository - docs/deployment/examples/netobserv_os_simple_svc

• Namespace used in the example: elastiflow.

• Allocatable resources needed (mCPU/MiB):

  • OpenSearch 2000m/4000Mi

  • OpenSearch Dashboards 1000m/768M

  • NetObserv Flow 1000m/6000Mi

• You may optionally customize and use config.hcl instead of the default config.

Install

• Create values and a config file for the Mermin Umbrella chart (or use ones from the repo)

  • Values contents

  • Config contents

• Add Helm charts and Deploy

  helm repo add mermin https://elastiflow.github.io/mermin/
  helm repo add netobserv https://elastiflow.github.io/helm-chart-netobserv/
  helm repo add opensearch https://opensearch-project.github.io/helm-charts/
  helm repo update
  # Deploy
  kubectl create namespace elastiflow
  helm upgrade -i --wait --timeout 15m -n elastiflow \
    -f values.yaml \
    --set-file mermin.config.content=config.hcl \
    --devel \
    mermin mermin/mermin-netobserv-os-stack

• Optionally install metrics-server to get metrics if it has not been installed yet

  kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/metrics-server/releases/download/v0.8.0/components.yaml
  # Patch to use insecure TLS, commonly needed on dev local clusters
  kubectl -n kube-system patch deployment metrics-server --type='json' -p='[{"op":"add","path":"/spec/template/spec/containers/0/args/-","value":"--kubelet-insecure-tls"}]'

Access

First, port forward the OpenSearch Dashboards service

kubectl -n elastiflow port-forward svc/elastiflow-os-dashboards 5601:5601

Now you can navigate to http://localhost:5601/ in your browser to open OpenSearch Dashboards, using admin/Elast1flow! as the user/password. Select "global tenant", and explore the data.

Hints

To render and diff Helm templates to Kubernetes manifests, run:

rm -rf helm_rendered; helm template -n elastiflow \
  -f values.yaml \
  --set-file mermin.config.content=config.hcl \
  --devel \
  mermin mermin/mermin-netobserv-os-stack \
  --output-dir helm_rendered

# Diff with existing K8s resources
kubectl -n elastiflow diff -R -f helm_rendered/