Show HN: LogDNA – Set up Kubernetes logging with 2 kubectl commands | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: LogDNA – Set up Kubernetes logging with 2 kubectl commands

github.com

76 pointsleeab23 comments

Hi everyone, I'm a co-founder / CTO of LogDNA. We were in Y Combinator's W15 batch and launched our cloud logging platform last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074537)

Based on user feedback, we're happy to announce our super easy Kubernetes integration. No more wrestling with fluentd configs, fiddling with Elasticsearch knobs or following 30-step guides cutting and pasting other people's configs.

  kubectl create secret generic logdna-agent-key --from-literal=logdna-agent-key=<YOUR LOGDNA API KEY>
  kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/logdna/logdna-agent/master/logdna-agent-ds.yaml

We're looking for some feedback on how we can improve this integration. We currently extract Kubernetes metadata: pod name, container name, container id, namespace.

Feel free to try it out. Happy to answer any questions!

kubernetes integration FTW! Thank you, thank you!!

:) Hope you'll give us a shot. And let us know what you think!

Thanks for putting this out there Lee! This is huge!

How do you guys handle multi-line log entries? This is the hardest part with existing setups, and would really help us trace exceptions as they occur in real-time.

We currently treat each line separately and we can maintain line ordering okay.

We have thought about this before and doing something like: if a line starts with tab or a fixed number of spaces a few times in a row, treat it as 1 line with \n's and store it as such. It would help with alerting and filtering alerts. Just not 100% sure if this will screw up anything.

It would be nice to improve the documentation a bit, and mention that only one agent is needed per node and that this agent will collect the logs across namespaces.

As I have understood,you do not set any namespace for the secret/daemonset, which is fine with me.

But this way, I could install multiple agents (for each namespace).

So a better documentation about the best practice installation for multiple namespaces would be nice.

Ahh yes, thanks for catching that. I just made a note that we collect from all namespaces currently.

Yeah, we now set our agent up w/o namespaces. During our beta, we originally had it set up inside `kube-system` but 2 of our testers mentioned that the pod wouldn't install unless it was in `default`. So we moved it out of `kube-system` but we still weren't sure what caused the issue since it worked fine on our cluster. We were using Kubernetes v1.4 so it could've been an older version issue.

Actually, kube-system is the right namespace for things like this.

I don't know why it didn't work -- maybe they put the secret in the wrong namespace?

Yeah one of those mysteries of life. :/ One day we'll probably go back and try this on a few older versions to see if we can repro what happened. But yeah, it was right off the bat when we started our beta, 2 different people said they had to modify the yaml in order to get it to work (something we wanted to avoid altogether).

Great work with this - definitely a pain point. Getting set up and trying it out now.

Awesome! We're pretty responsive on Intercom as well if you run into issues post install. But definitely share your feedback if you notice areas that can be improved.

Also interesting:

I have used the docker integration of logdna beforehand, before moving to Kubernetes.

The integration was done using docker compose per docker compose environment.

The logs which contained `err` were marked red as errors in logdna and I could trigger an alarm.

The same containers in Kubernetes with the same logs seem to marked as `info` now. I am not sure, why this is and how I can get the same behavior as before. Is there a way to tell Kubernetes about stderr/stdout? Or how would I trigger logdna to treat a log as error instead of info?

Hmmm this may have been a bug. It should show stderr as err. Let me look into this.

I love that you appear to have been built from the ground up to be HIPAA-compliant. I have emailed your sales team :)

Seems odd that this is getting upvotes. Most stuff is 2 (actually 1) commands away in Kubernetes ONCE you have the necessary manifests.

Yes that's true for many things in Kubernetes but not as frequent in the logging space for Kubernetes. Many still rely on Fluentd as a parsing filter first to extract metadata like pod name or container name. And most of the logging ones require you to edit your yaml in some way first. Ours is almost copy-pasteable, provided you have a LogDNA API key. :)

I don't think it's odd that it's getting upvotes, but centralized logging is already a feature (as an addon) of k8s. I have a helm chart that's a one-shot for setting up ELK and FluentD as a system service that aggregates all docker stdout logs and tags each stream with k8s metadata, so you can very easily slice/dice your logs even at scale. It includes a cronjob running es-curator so that logs older than some configurable threshold are automatically deleted.

e.g. output from my dev cluster:

      ~CK/elk/templates git:(master)  kc cluster-info 
    Kubernetes master is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443
    Elasticsearch is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/elasticsearch-logging
    Heapster is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/heapster
    KubeDNS is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns
    monitoring-grafana is running at https://192.168.16.16:8443/api/v1/proxy/namespaces/kube-system/services/monitoring-grafana

I think people want easy management of this, but I do wonder how successful this particular integration will be with such low-hanging self-managed alternatives. Where I think LogDNA will have a win is that you probably also have things running outside k8s that LogDNA helps integrate. So if you want all your k8s and non-k8s logs aggregated, and don't want to mess with it, then you might go with LogDNA.

Is this extremely useful chart public?

It is now. https://github.com/andrewstuart/helm-charts

Congrats! LogDNA is one of my favorite products. We're likely moving to Kubernetes shortly and were actually worried about logging, so this makes my life a lot easier

Thanks JJ! Yeah, we hope to earn your Kubernetes business :)

I've used LogDNA for a while now. It has been a good experience.

Awesome! And definitely let us know if we can improve in any way.

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