tobs - The Observability Stack for Kubernetes

Tobs is a tool that aims to make it as easy as possible to install a full observability stack into a Kubernetes cluster. Currently this stack includes:

• Kube-Prometheus the Kubernetes monitoring stack
  • Prometheus to collect metrics
  • AlertManager to fire the alerts
  • Grafana to visualize what's going on
  • Node-Exporter to export metrics from the nodes
  • Kube-State-Metrics to get metrics from kubernetes api-server
  • Prometheus-Operator to manage the life-cycle of Prometheus and AlertManager custom resource definitions (CRDs)
• Promscale (design doc) to store metrics for the long-term and allow analysis with both PromQL and SQL.
• TimescaleDB for long term storage of metrics and provides ability to query metrics data using SQL.
  • Postgres-Exporter to get metrics from PostgreSQL server
• Opentelemetry-Operator to manage the lifecycle of OpenTelemetryCollector Custom Resource Definition (CRDs)

We plan to expand this stack over time and welcome contributions.

Tobs provides a helm chart to make deployment and operations easier. It can be used directly or as a sub-chart for other projects.

Quick start

Prerequisites

Using tobs to install full observability stack with openTelemetry support currently requires installation of cert-manager. To do install it please follow cert-manager documentation.

Note: cert-manager is not required when using tobs with opentelemetry support disabled.

Installing the helm chart

The following command will install Kube-Prometheus, OpenTelemetry Operator, TimescaleDB, and Promscale into your Kubernetes cluster:

helm repo add timescale https://charts.timescale.com/
helm repo update
helm install --wait <release_name> timescale/tobs

Note: --wait flag is necessary for successfull installation as tobs helm chart can create opentelemetry Custom Resources only after opentelemetry-operator is up and running. This flag can be omitted when using tobs without opentelemetry support.

For detailed configuration and usage instructions, take a look at the helm chart's README.

Configuring the stack

All configuration for all components happens through the helm values.yaml file. You can view the self-documenting default values.yaml in the repo. We also have additional documentation about individual configuration settings in our Helm chart docs.

Compatibility matrix

Tobs vs. Kubernetes

Contributing

We welcome contributions to tobs, which is licensed and released under the open-source Apache License, Version 2. The same Contributor's Agreement applies as in TimescaleDB; please sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) if you're a new contributor.