Monitor Cloud Foundry foundations

DESK detects Cloud Foundry platform components like Gorouters, Diego cells, or Auctioneers and provides Cloud Foundry-specific metrics like Gorouter HTTP metrics and Auctioneer metrics. Such metrics are relevant to both operators who manage Cloud Foundry environments and application owners who run applications on Cloud Foundry because unhealthy Cloud Foundry platform components may also have a negative impact on applications. Furthermore, Davis, the DESK AI engine, automatically detects performance and availability issues related to Cloud Foundry applications as well as Cloud Foundry platform components.

The Cloud Foundry overview page complements Cloud Foundry metrics collected by DESK OneAgent at the process and host levels with additional metadata and metrics pulled from the Cloud Foundry API. With DESK, there’s no need to intercept the Firehose stream by deploying a nozzle.

Cloud Foundry overview page

Note: The Cloud Foundry overview page requires an ActiveGate (version 1.155 or higher) in combination with DESK OneAgent version 1.155 or higher and DESK Server version 1.156 or higher. Please note that the Auctioneers tile as well as the improved Gorouters tile are available with DESK OneAgent version 1.163 or higher and DESK Server version 1.164 or higher.

BOSH-managed VMs

Cloud Foundry leverages BOSH for deploying and administering Cloud Foundry foundations. DESK detects Cloud Foundry VMs (constituting a Cloud Foundry foundation) like Routers, Diego cells, Diego brain, UAA, Cloud controller and others as BOSH-managed VMs. DESK provides detailed metrics for Gorouter processes (running on a Router VM), Auctioneer processes (running on Diego brain), as well as resource utilization metrics for Diego cells on dedicated tiles.

DESK automatically detects the following metadata for your Cloud Foundry VMs which can be found on the Host overview page of your BOSH-managed VM:

BOSH instance metadata
BOSH stemcell version
Cloud Foundry vendor (currently limited to Pivotal)
Pivotal Platform PAS version
Technology type Diego cell and BOSH
Cloud platform type
Cloud Foundry foundation a host belongs to

You can leverage the automatically discovered Cloud Foundry specific metadata to manage large Cloud Foundry environments in several ways. For instance, auto-tagging rules allow you to group all entities that belong to the same BOSH deployment. Metadata like Technology type Diego cell or BOSH as well as Cloud platform type or Cloud Foundry foundation are also available for filtering your host list.

Gorouters

The Cloud Foundry Gorouter process running on the Router VM routes incoming traffic to the appropriate component, which is either a hosted application running on a Diego cell or a Cloud Controller component.

With DESK you'll get insights into the overall traffic flow of a Cloud Foundry foundation based on the number of total requests aggregated across all Gorouters. Furthermore, DESK indicates if Gorouter processes have a negative impact on your overall application responsiveness based on response latency. Repeatedly crashing applications or response issues from applications are typically resulting in an increasing number of HTTP 5xx or HTTP 502 responses, which DESK OneAgent also detects. Please find details about these use cases in this Gorouter metrics blog post.

These metrics can all be found on the Gorouters tile which is part of the Cloud Foundry overview page. Please note that Gorouter HTTP metrics are also available on Gorouter process group instance pages. Furthermore you can leverage Gorouter HTTP metrics (which you will find as Go HTTP metrics) for custom charting.

Auctioneers

Auctioneer processes are part of Diego brain and take care of distributing applications and tasks onto Diego cells. Auctioneers run auctions for tasks and applications by communicating with Diego cell reps.

With DESK detecting Cloud Foundry Auctioneer metrics you will be able to understand how well (or poor) Auctioneers are handling the distribution of applications and tasks onto Diego cells. You can inspect failed application instance placements and failed task placements and understand whether your Diego cells have enough resources or not. Increases in the average time to fetch states from Diego cells indicate that application staging requests to Diego may be failing. When observing high or low activity trends in successful application instance starts over an extended period, it’s recommended to scale Cloud Foundry foundation resources up or down as needed. Successful application instance reflect overall system activity levels but also indicate container churn.

These metrics can all be found on the Auctioneers tile which is part of the Cloud Foundry overview page. Please note that Auctioneer metrics are also available for custom charting.

Diego cells

All Cloud Foundry application instances and related tasks run as Garden containers on Diego cell VMs. To assess the health of Diego cells, DESK relies on generic host health measures. The Diego cells tile on the new Cloud Foundry overview page focuses on Memory usage, CPU usage, and Disk space usage.

For instance, a high CPU usage measurement results in a CPU saturation "resource event" and the generation of a problem. Problematic Diego cells are highlighted on the new Cloud Foundry overview page, enabling you to navigate to the problematic Diego cell and start your analysis with a single click.

Note: It may take up to one hour until Gorouters, Auctioneers, and Diego cells show up on the Cloud Foundry overview page.

Organizations, Spaces, Apps

The Cloud Foundry overview page not only provides an overview of the Cloud Foundry VMs (aka BOSH-managed VMs) that constitute your Cloud Foundry deployment, it also includes Cloud Foundry concepts like Organizations and Spaces holding your applications.

Organizations in Cloud Foundry represent development accounts that one or more collaborators can own and use. To represent Cloud Foundry organizations in DESK, we recommend using the concept of Management zones to organize your Cloud Foundry foundations. Organizations can contain multiple spaces. Spaces in Cloud Foundry provide users with access to a shared location for application development, deployment, and maintenance. Every Cloud Foundry application and service is scoped to a space.

Out-of-the-box, DESK automatically detects Cloud Foundry-specific metadata like organization, space, space ID, application, application ID, and instance index. DESK also allows you to define your own process group metadata for Cloud Foundry applications based on your organization’s or environment’s unique needs.

Properties

The Cloud Foundry overview page provides a dedicated Properties tile on which you’ll find the Cloud Foundry API version as well as the Cloud Foundry Build version (which represents the Cloud Foundry foundation version). These properties are gathered from the Cloud Foundry API /info endpoint.

Start monitoring your Cloud Foundry foundation

To connect your Cloud Foundry foundation

Go to Settings > Cloud and virtualization > Cloud Foundry.
Click Connect new foundation.
Type in your Cloud Foundry API target URL, your Authentication endpoint, your Cloud Foundry Username, and Password.

See Connect your Cloud Foundry foundations to DESK for further details.