Monitoring and Alerting

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In addition to CockroachDB's built-in safeguards against failure, it is critical to actively monitor the overall health and performance of a cluster running in production and to create alerting rules that promptly send notifications when there are events that require investigation or intervention.

This page explains available monitoring tools and critical events and metrics to alert on.

Monitoring tools

DB Console

The DB Console displays essential metrics about a cluster's health, such as node status, number of unavailable ranges, and queries per second and service latency across the cluster. This tool is designed to help you optimize cluster performance and troubleshoot issues. The DB Console is accessible from every node at http://<host>:<http-port>, or http://<host>:8080 by default.

For more information on accessing the DB Console, see Access DB Console.

Cluster API

The Cluster API is a REST API that provides much of the same information about your cluster and nodes as is available from the DB Console and is accessible from each node at the same address and port as the DB Console.

For more information, see the Cluster API overview and reference.

crdb_internal system catalog

The crdb_internal system catalog is a schema that contains information about internal objects, processes, and metrics related to a specific database.

For details, see crdb_internal.

Health endpoints

CockroachDB provides two HTTP endpoints for checking the health of individual nodes.

These endpoints are also available through the Cluster API under /v2/health/.

/health

If a node is down, the http://<host>:<http-port>/health endpoint returns a Connection refused error:

$ curl http://localhost:8080/health

curl: (7) Failed to connect to localhost port 8080: Connection refused

Otherwise, it returns an HTTP 200 OK status response code with an empty body:

{

}

The /health endpoint does not returns details about the node such as its private IP address. These details could be considered privileged information in some deployments. If you need to retrieve node details, you can use the /_status/details endpoint along with a valid authentication cookie.

/health?ready=1

The http://<node-host>:<http-port>/health?ready=1 endpoint returns an HTTP 503 Service Unavailable status response code with an error in the following scenarios:

• The node is in the wait phase of the node shutdown sequence. This causes load balancers and connection managers to reroute traffic to other nodes before the node is drained of SQL client connections and leases, and is a necessary check during rolling upgrades.

  Tip:

  If you find that your load balancer's health check is not always recognizing a node as unready before the node shuts down, you can increase the server.shutdown.drain_wait cluster setting to cause a node to return 503 Service Unavailable even before it has started shutting down.

• The node is unable to communicate with a majority of the other nodes in the cluster, likely because the cluster is unavailable due to too many nodes being down.

$ curl http://localhost:8080/health?ready=1

{
  "error": "node is not healthy",
  "code": 14,
  "message": "node is not healthy",
  "details": [
  ]
}

Otherwise, it returns an HTTP 200 OK status response code with an empty body:

{

}

Raw status endpoints

Several endpoints return raw status metrics in JSON at http://<host>:<http-port>/#/debug. Feel free to investigate and use these endpoints, but note that they are subject to change.

Node status command

The cockroach node status command gives you metrics about the health and status of each node.

• With the --ranges flag, you get granular range and replica details, including unavailability and under-replication.
• With the --stats flag, you get granular disk usage details.
• With the --decommission flag, you get details about the node decommissioning process.
• With the --all flag, you get all of the above.

Prometheus endpoint

Every node of a CockroachDB cluster exports granular time series metrics at http://<host>:<http-port>/_status/vars. The metrics are formatted for easy integration with Prometheus, an open source tool for storing, aggregating, and querying time series data, but the format is easy-to-parse and can be processed to work with other third-party monitoring systems (e.g., Sysdig and Stackdriver).

$ curl http://localhost:8080/_status/vars

# HELP gossip_infos_received Number of received gossip Info objects
# TYPE gossip_infos_received counter
gossip_infos_received 0
# HELP sys_cgocalls Total number of cgo calls
# TYPE sys_cgocalls gauge
sys_cgocalls 3501
# HELP sys_cpu_sys_percent Current system cpu percentage
# TYPE sys_cpu_sys_percent gauge
sys_cpu_sys_percent 1.098855319644276e-10
# HELP replicas_quiescent Number of quiesced replicas
# TYPE replicas_quiescent gauge
replicas_quiescent{store="1"} 20
...

Alerting tools

In addition to actively monitoring the overall health and performance of a cluster, it is also essential to configure alerting rules that promptly send notifications when CockroachDB experiences events that require investigation or intervention.

This section identifies the most important events that you might want to create alerting rules for, and provides pre-defined rules definitions for these events appropriate for use with Prometheus's Alertmanager.

Alertmanager

If you have configured Prometheus to monitor your CockroachDB instance, you can also configure alerting rule definitions to have Prometheus's Alertmanager detect important events and alert you when they occur.

Prometheus alerting rules endpoint

Every CockroachDB node exports an alerting rules template at http://<host>:<http-port>/api/v2/rules/. These rule definitions are formatted for easy integration with Prometheus's Alertmanager.

$ curl http://localhost:8080/api/v2/rules/

rules/alerts:
    rules:
        - alert: UnavailableRanges
          expr: (sum by(instance, cluster) (ranges_unavailable)) > 0
          for: 10m0s
          annotations:
            summary: Instance {{ $labels.instance }} has {{ $value }} unavailable ranges
        - alert: TrippedReplicaCircuitBreakers
          expr: (sum by(instance, cluster) (kv_replica_circuit_breaker_num_tripped_replicas)) > 0
          for: 10m0s
          annotations:
            summary: Instance {{ $labels.instance }} has {{ $value }} tripped per-Replica circuit breakers
...

Working with Alertmanager rules

To add a rule from the api/v2/rules/ rules endpoint, create or edit your alerts.rules.yml file and copy the rule definition for the event you want to alert on. For example, to add a rule to alert you when unavailable ranges are detected, copy the following from the rules endpoint into your alerts.rules.yml file:

- alert: UnavailableRanges
  expr: (sum by(instance, cluster) (ranges_unavailable)) > 0
  for: 10m0s
  annotations:
    summary: Instance {{ $labels.instance }} has {{ $value }} unavailable ranges

If you already followed the steps from Monitor CockroachDB with Prometheus, you should already have a alerts.rules.yml file. If you are creating a new alerts.rules.yml file, be sure that it begins with the following three lines:

groups:
- name: rules/alerts.rules
  rules:

Place your desired rule(s) underneath the rules: header. For example, the following shows an alerts.rules.yml file with the unavailable ranges rule defined:

groups:
- name: rules/alerts.rules
  rules:
  - alert: UnavailableRanges
    expr: (sum by(instance, cluster) (ranges_unavailable)) > 0
    for: 10m0s
    annotations:
      summary: Instance {{ $labels.instance }} has {{ $value }} unavailable ranges

Once you have created or edited your alerts.rules.yml file, reference it in your prometheus.yml configuration file with the following:

rule_files:
- "rules/alerts.rules.yml"

If you already followed the steps from Monitor CockroachDB with Prometheus, this reference is already present in your prometheus.yml file.

Start Prometheus and Alertmanager to begin watching for events to alert on. You can view imported rules on your Prometheus server's web interface at http://<host>:<http-port>/rules. Use the "State" column to verify that the rules were imported correctly.

Events to alert on

Node is down

• Rule: Send an alert when a node has been down for 15 minutes or more.

• How to detect: If a node is down, its _status/vars endpoint will return a Connection refused error. Otherwise, the liveness_livenodes metric will be the total number of live nodes in the cluster.

• Rule definition: Use the InstanceDead alert from our pre-defined alerting rules.

Node is restarting too frequently

• Rule: Send an alert if a node has restarted more than once in the last 10 minutes.

• How to detect: Calculate this using the number of times the sys_uptime metric in the node's _status/vars output was reset back to zero. The sys_uptime metric gives you the length of time, in seconds, that the cockroach process has been running.

• Rule definition: Use the InstanceFlapping alert from our pre-defined alerting rules.

Node is running low on disk space

• Rule: Send an alert when a node has less than 15% of free space remaining.

• How to detect: Divide the capacity metric by the capacity_available metric in the node's _status/vars output.

• Rule definition: Use the StoreDiskLow alert from our pre-defined alerting rules.

Node is not executing SQL

• Rule: Send an alert when a node is not executing SQL despite having connections.

• How to detect: The sql_conns metric in the node's _status/vars output will be greater than 0 while the sql_query_count metric will be 0. You can also break this down by statement type using sql_select_count, sql_insert_count, sql_update_count, and sql_delete_count.

CA certificate expires soon

• Rule: Send an alert when the CA certificate on a node will expire in less than a year.

• How to detect: Calculate this using the security_certificate_expiration_ca metric in the node's _status/vars output.

• Rule definition: Use the CACertificateExpiresSoon alert from our pre-defined alerting rules.

Node certificate expires soon

• Rule: Send an alert when a node's certificate will expire in less than a year.

• How to detect: Calculate this using the security_certificate_expiration_node metric in the node's _status/vars output.

• Rule definition: Use the NodeCertificateExpiresSoon alert from our pre-defined alerting rules.

Changefeed is experiencing high latency

• Rule: Send an alert when the latency of any changefeed running on any node is higher than the set threshold, which depends on the gc.ttlseconds variable set in the cluster.

• How to detect: Calculate this using a threshold, where the threshold is less than the value of the gc.ttlseconds variable. For example, changefeed.max_behind_nanos > [some threshold].

Unavailable ranges

• Rule: Send an alert when the number of ranges with fewer live replicas than needed for quorum is non-zero for too long.

• How to detect: Calculate this using the ranges_unavailable metric in the node's _status/vars output.

• Rule definition: Use the UnavailableRanges alerting rule from your cluster's api/v2/rules/ metrics endpoint.

Tripped replica circuit breakers

• Rule: Send an alert when a replica stops serving traffic due to other replicas being offline for too long.

• How to detect: Calculate this using the kv_replica_circuit_breaker_num_tripped_replicas metric in the node's _status/vars output.

• Rule definition: Use the TrippedReplicaCircuitBreakers alerting rule from your cluster's api/v2/rules/ metrics endpoint.

Under-replicated ranges

• Rule: Send an alert when the number of ranges with replication below the replication factor is non-zero for too long.

• How to detect: Calculate this using the ranges_underreplicated metric in the node's _status/vars output.

• Rule definition: Use the UnderreplicatedRanges alerting rule from your cluster's api/v2/rules/ metrics endpoint.

Requests stuck in Raft

• Rule: Send an alert when requests are taking a very long time in replication.

• How to detect: Calculate this using the requests_slow_raft metric in the node's _status/vars output.

• Rule definition: Use the RequestsStuckInRaft alerting rule from your cluster's api/v2/rules/ metrics endpoint.

High open file descriptor count

• Rule: Send an alert when a cluster is getting close to the open file descriptor limit.

• How to detect: Calculate this using the sys_fd_softlimit metric in the node's _status/vars output.

• Rule definition: Use the HighOpenFDCount alerting rule from your cluster's api/v2/rules/ metrics endpoint.

See also

• Production Checklist
• Manual Deployment
• Orchestrated Deployment
• Local Deployment
• Third-Party Monitoring Integrations
• Metrics

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