Operator based metrics

guide on how to enable crd-based scraping targets

Step 1 - Enable custom metrics and victoria-metrics-operator

1. Enable custom metrics scraping and victoria-metrics-operator

custom-metrics:
  enabled: true
victoria-metrics-operator:
  enabled: true
  builtinVMAgent:
# Optional, you can decide to provision VMAgent separately
    enabled: true
# Optional: customize reconciliation scope, by default - only groundcover namespace
#    podScrapeSelector: {}
#    serviceScrapeSelector: {}
#    nodeScrapeSelector: {}
#    staticScrapeSelector: {}
#    probeSelector: {}
#    replicaCount: 1

Step 2 - Deploy Monitoring CRDs

By default the vm operator will identify the Prometheus CRDs (ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, PrometheusRule and Probe ) that are already deployed and will scrape them automatically.

In case you want to deploy a test monitor object, here is an example using PodMonitor

1. Create the following my-test-podmonitor.yaml

apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: PodMonitor
metadata:
  name: scrape-demo
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      {app labels}
  podMetricsEndpoints:
  - port: {app metrics port}
  namespaceSelector:
      matchNames:
        - {pod namespace}

1. Deploy it

kubectl apply -n groundcover -f my-test-podmonitor.yaml

1. The vmagent will reload its configuration and will start scraping the target, metrics should appear in groundcover's grafana shortly after.

Other then supporting the standard Prometheus CRDs, VictoriaMetrics operator has their own proprietary CRDs that can be used, more about them can be found here.