Scale Set Metrics ADR (#2568)
Co-authored-by: Bassem Dghaidi <568794+Link-@users.noreply.github.com>
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| # Exposing metrics | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Date: 2023-05-08 | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| **Status**: Proposed | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ## Context | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Prometheus metrics are a common way to monitor the cluster. Providing metrics | ||||
| can be a helpful way to monitor scale sets and the health of the ephemeral runners. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ## Proposal | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Two main components are driving the behavior of the scale set: | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| 1. ARC controllers responsible for managing Kubernetes resources. | ||||
| 2. The `AutoscalingListener`, driver of the autoscaling solution responsible for | ||||
|    describing the desired state. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| We can approach publishing those metrics in 3 different ways | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ### Option 1: Expose a metrics endpoint for the controller-manager and every instance of the listener | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| To expose metrics, we would need to create 3 additional resources: | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| 1. `ServiceMonitor` - a resource used by Prometheus to match namespaces and | ||||
|    services from where it needs to gather metrics | ||||
| 2. `Service` for the `gha-runner-scale-set-controller` - service that will | ||||
|    target ARC controller `Deployment` | ||||
| 3. `Service` for each `gha-runner-scale-set` listener - service that will target | ||||
|    a single listener pod for each `AutoscalingRunnerSet` | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| #### Pros | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - Easy to control which scale set exposes metrics and which does not. | ||||
| - Easy to implement using helm charts in case they are enabled per chart | ||||
|   installation. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| #### Cons | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - With a cluster running many scale sets, we are going to create a lot of | ||||
|   resources. | ||||
| - In case metrics are enabled on the controller manager level, and they should | ||||
|   be applied across all `AutoscalingRunnerSets`, it is difficult to inherit this | ||||
|   configuration by applying helm charts. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ### Option 2: Create a single metrics aggregator service | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| To create an aggregator service, we can create a simple web application | ||||
| responsible for publishing and gathering metrics. All listeners would be | ||||
| responsible to communicate the metrics on each message, and controllers are | ||||
| responsible to communicate the metrics on each reconciliation. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| The application can be executed as a single pod, or as a side container next to | ||||
| the manager. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| #### Running the aggregator as a container in the controller-manager pod | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| **Pros:** | ||||
| - It exists side by side and is following the life cycle of the controller | ||||
|   manager | ||||
| - We don't need to introduce another controller managing the state of the pod | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| **Cons** | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - Crashes of the aggregator can influence the controller manager execution | ||||
| - The controller manager pod needs more resources to run | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| #### Running the aggregator in a separate pod | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| **Pros** | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - Does not influence the controller manager pod | ||||
| - The life cycle of the metric can be controlled by the controller manager (by | ||||
|   implementing another controller) | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| **Cons** | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - We need to implement the controller that can spin up the aggregator in case of | ||||
|   the crash. | ||||
| - If we choose not to implement the controller, the resource like `Deployment` | ||||
|   can be used to manage the aggregator, but we lose control over its life cycle. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| #### Metrics webserver requirements | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| 1. Create a web server with a single `/metrics` endpoint. The endpoint will have | ||||
|    `POST` and `GET` methods registered. The `GET` is used by Prometheus to | ||||
|    fetch the metrics, while the `POST` is going to be used by controllers and | ||||
|    listeners to publish their metrics. | ||||
| 2. `ServiceMonitor` - to target the metrics aggregator service | ||||
| 3. `Service` sitting in front of the web server. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| **Pros** | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - This implementation requires a few additional resources to be created | ||||
|   in a cluster. | ||||
| - Web server is easy to implement and easy to document - all metrics are aggregated in a | ||||
|   single package, and the web server only needs to apply them to its state on | ||||
|   `POST`. The `GET` handler is simple. | ||||
| - We can avoid Pushgateway from Prometheus. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| **Cons** | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - Another image that we need to publish on release. | ||||
| - Change in metric configuration (on manager update) would require re-creation | ||||
|   of all listeners. This is not a big problem but is something to point out. | ||||
| - Managing requests/limits can be tricky. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ### Option 3: Use a Prometheus Pushgateway | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| #### Pros | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - Using a supported way of pushing the metrics. | ||||
| - Easy to implement using their library. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| #### Cons | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - In the Prometheus docs, they specify that: "Usually, the only valid use case | ||||
|   for Pushgateway is for capturing the outcome of a service-level batch job". | ||||
|   The listener does not really fit this criteria. | ||||
| - Pushgateway is a single point of failure and potential bottleneck. | ||||
| - You lose Prometheus's automatic instance health monitoring via the up metric (generated on every scrape). | ||||
| - The Pushgateway never forgets series pushed to it and will expose them to Prometheus forever unless those series are manually deleted via the Pushgateway's API. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ## Decision | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Since there are many ways in which you can collect metrics, we have decided not | ||||
| to apply `prometheus-operator` resources nor `Service`. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| The responsibility of the controller and the autoscaling listener is | ||||
| only to expose metrics. It is up to the user to decide how to collect them. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| When installing the ARC, the configuration for both the controller manager | ||||
| and autoscaling listeners' metric servers is established. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ### Controller metrics | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| By default, metrics server is listening on `0.0.0.0:8080`. | ||||
| You can control the port of the metrics server using the `--metrics-addr` flag. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Metrics can be collected from `/metrics` endpoint | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| If the value of  `--metrics-addr` is an empty string, metrics server won't be | ||||
| started. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ### Autoscaling listeners | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| By default, metrics server is listening on `0.0.0.0:8080`. | ||||
| The endpoint used to expose metrics is `/metrics`. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| You can control both the address and the endpoint using `--listener-metrics-addr` and `--listener-metrics-endpoint` flags. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| If the value of  `--listener-metrics-addr` is an empty string, metrics server won't be | ||||
| started. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ### Metrics exposed by the controller | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| To get a better understanding of health and workings of the cluster | ||||
| resources, we need to expose the following metrics: | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - `pending_ephemeral_runners` - Number of ephemeral runners in a pending state. | ||||
|   This information can show the latency between creating an `EphemeralRunner` | ||||
|   resource, and having an ephemeral runner pod started and ready to receive a | ||||
|   job. | ||||
| - `running_ephemeral_runners` - Number of ephemeral runners currently running. | ||||
|   This information is helpful to see how many ephemeral runner pods are running | ||||
|   at any given time. | ||||
| - `failed_ephemeral_runners` - Number of ephemeral runners in a `Failed` state. | ||||
|   This information is helpful to catch the faulty image, or some underlying | ||||
|   problem. When the ephemeral runner controller is not able to start the | ||||
|   ephemeral runner pod after multiple retries, it will set the state of the | ||||
|   `EphemeralRunner` to failed. Since the controller can not recover from this | ||||
|   state, it can be useful to set Prometheus alerts to catch this issue quickly. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ### Metrics exposed by the `AutoscalingListener` | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Since the listener is responsible for communicating the state with the actions | ||||
| service, it can expose actions service related data through metrics. In | ||||
| particular: | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| - `available_jobs` - Number of jobs with `runs-on` matching the runner scale set name. Jobs are not yet assigned but are acquired by the runner scale set. | ||||
| - `acquired_jobs`- Number of jobs acquired by the scale set. | ||||
| - `assigned_jobs` - Number of jobs assigned to this scale set. | ||||
| - `running_jobs` - Number of jobs running (or about to be run). | ||||
| - `registered_runners` - Number of registered runners. | ||||
| - `busy_runners` - Number of registered runners running a job. | ||||
| - `min_runners` - Number of runners desired by the scale set. | ||||
| - `max_runners` - Number of runners desired by the scale set. | ||||
| - `desired_runners` - Number of runners desired by the scale set. | ||||
| - `idle_runners` - Number of registered runners not running a job. | ||||
| - `available_jobs_total` - Total number of jobs available for the scale set (runs-on matches and scale set passes all the runner group permission checks). | ||||
| - `acquired_jobs_total` - Total number of jobs acquired by the scale set. | ||||
| - `assigned_jobs_total` - Total number of jobs assigned to the scale set. | ||||
| - `started_jobs_total` - Total number of jobs started. | ||||
| - `completed_jobs_total` - Total number of jobs completed. | ||||
| - `job_queue_duration_seconds` - Time spent waiting for workflow jobs to get assigned to the scale set after queueing (in seconds). | ||||
| - `job_startup_duration_seconds` - Time spent waiting for a workflow job to get started on the runner owned by the scale set (in seconds). | ||||
| - `job_execution_duration_seconds` - Time spent executing workflow jobs by the scale set (in seconds). | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ### Metric names | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Listener metrics belong to the `github_runner_scale_set` subsystem, so the names | ||||
| are going to have the `github_runner_scale_set_` prefix. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Controller metrics belong to the `github_runner_scale_set_controller` subsystem, | ||||
| so the names are going to have `github_runner_scale_set_controller` prefix. | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| ## Consequences | ||||
| 
 | ||||
| Users can define alerts, monitor the behavior of both the actions-based metrics | ||||
| (gathered from the listener) and the Kubernetes resource-based metrics | ||||
| (gathered from the controller manager). | ||||
| 
 | ||||
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