What is Anypoint Runtime Fabric?
Runtime Fabric (RTF) is a container service to deploy mule runtime on cloud (AWS/Azure) or on a data center (on-premise). Runtime fabric automates the deployment and orchestration of Mule application and API gateway and is based on Docker and Kubernetes to achieve portability and horizontal scalability.
The Ops Center is a web-based management tool that enables developers to manage and monitor Anypoint Runtime Fabric components, applications and perform the following types of tasks:
- Adding and removing servers
- Viewing logs and configuring log forwarding,
- Monitoring system stability and performance
In this article, we provide an overview of how to use the Ops Center to monitor Anypoint Runtime Fabric.
Note: This Ops Center is not an alternative to the Anypoint Monitoring control pane, rather an additional facility to control and manage the RTF infrastructure and services.
Admin
On this admin view you can check the health of the system. In case of any issues with the cluster you can raise a Mulesoft support case in this dashboard.
The support team will most likely request the debugging information to assist you, you can access this on the right hand side of the screen where there is a "Download Debug Info" button which collects the debug information for all the cluster nodes including controllers as well as workers. (The same information can be generated by executing kubectl commands from the command line.)
On the right hand side, select the "Settings" menu option to open some additional admin settings. The "Roles" section here, allows you to add users and assign roles (for example assigning a user the “view only” role).
Servers
In the servers section you can see all of the servers / nodes on the RTF instance. You can click into a node and see the root access of that instance.
Select the “root” option to open the command prompt for that node, where the user can run all commands required by the operations team. The user that has access to the Ops Center has root access to all the nodes in the Runtime Fabric instance so it is critical that you take on the responsibilities to maintain and manage these nodes.
You can see how many applications have been deployed and their status, running or completed (services running in the background that makes the RTF possible).
For more commands we would have to refer to the Kubernetes documentation. Mulesoft support portal hosts a range of knowledge articles that can guide you with appropriate commands related to various issues.
In this section, you can see the list of activities performed on the RTF instance. These activities are a set of operations like infrastructure changes to the RTF instance - for example, adding a new worker node for horizontal scaling of the instance, those changes will be displayed here.
If needed, you can dig deeper into a detailed view for each one by clicking logs (to check for errors, for example).
Logs
This is a very robust log and it shows you everything that is happening in the Runtime Fabric instance. As this view can be very busy to be of use, you can create filters to help you differentiate between pods and containers, for example, as we see in the screenshot below:
You can use these out-of-the-box filters or you can jump onto the Kubernetes section.
With the help of additional configurations the application logs can be shipped to the Anypoint Monitoring. To achieve this, you need to have a Titanium subscription.
Kubernetes
In the Kubernetes section of the Ops Center you can drill down into the specific pod. This section provides access to various tabs detailing pods, services and jobs. You can also see a filtered view of individual pods using pre-set namespaces such as “rtf”.
You can then see if every pod is running and, if not, you can review the logs associated with a particular pod and look for errors.
In this section you can see out-of-the-box configurations such as kapacitor-alerts. You can also view all the configurations pre-defined and set for all the underlying services that are orchestrated in the Runtime Fabric appliance.
This last section is an extension of what you would typically see in the monitoring dashboard of Anypoint Platform. However, monitoring features in the Ops Center are more infrastructure oriented.
You can filter the dashboard by namespace or pod to view various performance metrics for individual pods or an application respectively.
For more detailed monitoring you can use Anypoint Platform's Monitoring section which provides additional dashboards and customisations for Mule APIs.
Other useful links:
Recording: How to successfully implement Anypoint Runtime Fabric
Related reads.
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