CODEWITHSUNDEEP
loggingkubernetesgoogle-cloud-platformgoogle-kubernetes-engine
user10518
user10518

Reputation: 117

Option for collecting logs in Kubernetes in GCP

A semi related question: Options for getting logs in kubernetes pods

I am running a tomcat application in Google Kubernetes Engine and that has output to log files like catalina.log, localhost.log and more. As these are not the usual stdout, I have several options and questions regarding the best way of pulling log files to a shared folder / volume in a Kubernetes environment.

Option 1:
Batch job that uses kubectl cp to move the log files to host, but I don't think this is advisable as pods die frequently and crucial log files will be lost.

Option 2:
I'm not sure if this is possible as I am still learning how persistent volumes work compared to docker, but is it possible to mount a PVC with the same mountPath as the tomcat/logs folder so that the logs gets written to the PVC directly?

In Docker, I used to supply the container run command with a mount-source to specify the volume used for log consolidation:

docker container run -d -it --rm --mount source=logs,target=/opt/tomcat/logs ....

I am wondering if this is possible in the Kubernetes environment, for example, in the deployment or pod manifest file:

        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /opt/tomcat/logs/
          name: logs
      volumes:
      - name: logs
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: logs

Option 3:
I want to avoid complicating my setup for now, but if all options are exhausted, I would be setting up ElasticSearch, Kibana and Filebeat to ship my log files.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 835

Answers (1)

user10518
user10518

Reputation: 117

The solution is actually quite simple after I figured out how everything works. Hopefully this helps someone. I went ahead for option #2.

First define a pvc for my tomcat log files:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: tomcat-logs
spec:
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 5Gi

In my deployment.yaml, reference it to the PVC created:

...
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: opt/tomcat/logs
          name: tomcat-logs          
      volumes:
      - name: tomcat-logs
        persistentVolumeClaim:
          claimName: tomcat-logs       
...

As noted, the PVC is mounted as root, the container will not be able to write to it if they do not have sufficient privileges. For my case, it was my DockerFile that defined my user, and changing it to root resolves it.

Edit: If running the DockerFile as root is not viable, you can escalate the privileges in the deployment by adding:

...
    spec:
      securityContext:
        runAsUser: 0
....
        securityContext:
          privileged: true

A related question here: Allowing access to a PersistentVolumeClaim to non-root user

Upvotes: 1

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