Monitoring

While having high availability and disaster recovery systems in place helps in the event of something going wrong with your PostgreSQL cluster, monitoring helps you anticipate problems before they happen. Monitoring can also help you diagnose and resolve issues that may cause degraded performance.

Adding the Exporter Sidecar

Let's look at how we can add the Crunchy Postgres Exporter sidecar to your cluster using the kustomize/postgres example in the Postgres Operator examples repository.

Monitoring tools are added using the spec.monitoring section of the custom resource. Currently, the only monitoring tool supported is the Crunchy PostgreSQL Exporter configured with pgMonitor.

In the kustomize/postgres/postgres.yaml file, add the following YAML to the spec:

monitoring:
  pgmonitor:
    exporter: {}
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Save your changes and run:

kubectl apply -k kustomize/postgres
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PGO will detect the change and add the Exporter sidecar to all Postgres Pods that exist in your cluster. PGO will also configure the Exporter to connect to the database and gather metrics. These metrics can be accessed using the PGO Monitoring stack.

Configuring TLS Encryption for the Exporter

PGO allows you to configure the exporter sidecar to use TLS encryption. If you provide a custom TLS Secret via the exporter spec:

monitoring:
  pgmonitor:
    exporter:
      customTLSSecret:
        name: hippo.tls
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Like other custom TLS Secrets that can be configured with PGO, the Secret will need to be created in the same Namespace as your PostgresCluster. It should also contain the TLS key (tls.key) and TLS certificate (tls.crt) needed to enable encryption.

data:
  tls.crt: $VALUE
  tls.key: $VALUE
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After you configure TLS for the exporter, you will need to update your Prometheus deployment to use TLS, and your connection to the exporter will be encrypted. Check out the Prometheus documentation for more information on configuring TLS for Prometheus.

Accessing the Metrics

Once the Crunchy PostgreSQL Exporter has been enabled in your cluster, follow the steps outlined in PGO Monitoring to install the monitoring stack. This will allow you to deploy a pgMonitor configuration of Prometheus, Grafana, and Alertmanager monitoring tools in Kubernetes. These tools will be set up by default to connect to the Exporter containers on your Postgres Pods.

Next Steps

Now that we can monitor our cluster, let's look at how we can customize the Postgres cluster configuration.