Monitoring Cloud Foundry and VMware Tanzu (formerly know as Pivotal Cloud Foundry)

Garden containers

Garden containers have dedicated dashboards. See the Garden documentation for more information.

Monitoring BOSH agent, Gorouter and other important processes

Note: The Instana Microservices Application Monitoring for VMware Tanzu tile version 1.168.x and above is required to access this functionality.

Instana automatically monitors out-of-the-box CPU, memory, and file descriptor consumption of notable processes in the Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes control plane, specifically:

• BOSH agent
• BOSH DNS
• Gorouter
• Cloud Controller
• kube-apiserver
• kube-controller-manager
• kube-scheduler

Listing applications

By default Instana lists all application it detects from all reporting clusters. The applications are easily searchable or sortable by the most relevant information like state, organization or space:

Application dashboard

The Cloud Foundry Application dashboard contains the most important information for an application to check for the status and any problems. It lists the Garden containers that this application is made of and links to a detailed Garden Container dashboard.

It also provdes access to all calls to this application via the Analyze Calls button.

Discovering managed services

The Instana agents deployed across the foundation detect and monitor the services running on them. Services created by some tiles are automatically monitored, with the Instana agent detecting the credentials and settings, see the Supported Versions section.

Services that are not automatically monitored, can be configured manually via the custom agent configuration facilities of the Instana tile.

If there are tiles or BOSH releases you would like to see configured automatically, let us know by opening a feature request in Instana Idea submission.

Automatic maintenance windows for BOSH deployments

The Instana Microservices Application Monitoring for VMware Tanzu tile version 1.168.x and above is required to access this functionality.

The Instana tile automatically detects BOSH deployments running across the VMware Tanzu foundation and creates, schedule, and unschedule maintenance windows.

For more information on this feature, see our Maintenance Windows documentation.

The "Automatic Maintenance Windows" feature of the tile requires the following configurations:

• Backend connection > API endpoint URL: must point to your tenant unit in Instana.
• Backend connection > API token: requires an API token with, at least, the Configuration of custom alerts permission. For more information, see our API Tokens documentation.

To deactivate the Automatic Maintenance Windows functionality, select the Agent automatic configurations > Automatic maintenance windows for BOSH option in the tile configuration.

To roll out the change, select Apply Changes in OpsManager for the Application Service for VMs or Kubernetes Grid tile.

Pipeline feedback for BOSH deployments

The Instana Microservices Application Monitoring tile version 1.166.1 and above is required to access this functionality.

Important: The status of the Pipeline Feedback functionality is currently experimental. In foundations with many service instances, each of which usually has a a dedicated BOSH deployment, it may become a bit too chatty. Let us know what you think of it!

The Instana tile automatically detects BOSH deployments running across the foundation, and as part of the Pipeline Feedback functionality within Instana, these deployments are reported as releases.

For more information, see our Pipeline Feedback Integrations documentation.

Supported runtimes

• Java, no special setup required

• Node.js, and the Instana Buildpack automates the setup entirely

• .NET Core

• PHP, currently experimental

• Python, and the Instana Buildpack automates the setup entirely

• Ruby, and the Instana Buildpack automates the setup entirely

Instana buildpack

The instana_buildpack Cloud Foundry buildpack is currently in experimental status. The deployment of the instana_buildpack is opt-in in the tile under the Agent automatic configurations screen.

Since version 1.177.0, the tile integrates the instana_buildpack Cloud Foundry buildpack that automates the Instana setup of Node.js, Python or Ruby Cloud Foundry application. When the instana_buildpack is opted-in by the Cloud Foundry application manifest, it automatically configures the staging process to bake in the droplet (the container image that is run by Cloud Foundry) all that is needed to have that Cloud Foundry application monitored with Instana.

The instana_buildpack is a so-called decorator buildpack, which adds logic and resources to the staging process, and must be used in conjunction with a final buildpack, which actually launches the Cloud Foundry application instances. For example the following command line will use the instana_buildpack to automate monitoring of a Node.js application:

cf push -b instana_buildpack -b nodejs_buildpack

The instana_buildpack buildpack must not be used as the last buildpack in the sequence of buildpacks, as that will result in a staging error.

The same can be achieved defining multiple buildpacks in the application manifest.yml as follows:

---
applications:
- name: test-nodejs
  buildpacks:
    - instana_buildpack
    - nodejs_buildpack

For more information on how to use multiple buildpack when pushing Cloud Foundry applications, refer to the Pushing an App with Multiple Buildpacks documentation.