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Commercial support for NGINX Service Mesh is available to customers who currently have active NGINX Microservices Bundle subscriptions. F5 NGINX announced the End of Sale (EoS) for the NGINX Microservices Bundles as of July 1, 2023.

See our End of Sale announcement for more details.

Install NGINX Service Mesh with Basic Observability

This topic provides a walkthrough of deploying NGINX Service Mesh with basic observability components.

Overview

In this tutorial, we will install NGINX Service Mesh with some basic observability components. These components include Prometheus for collecting metrics, Grafana for visualizing metrics, and the OpenTelemetry Collector and Jaeger for collecting traces. These deployments are meant for demo purposes only, and are not recommended for production environments.

Deploy the Observability Components

Download the following files containing the configurations for the observability components:

Deploy the components:

kubectl apply -f prometheus.yaml -f grafana.yaml -f otel-collector.yaml -f jaeger.yaml

This command creates the nsm-monitoring namespace and deploys all of the components in that namespace. This namespace does not have the auto-inject label because we do not want to inject the sidecar into the observability deployments.

Install NGINX Service Mesh

Install NGINX Service Mesh and configure it to integrate with the observability deployments:

Using the CLI:

nginx-meshctl deploy --prometheus-address "prometheus.nsm-monitoring.svc:9090" --telemetry-exporters "type=otlp,host=otel-collector.nsm-monitoring.svc,port=4317" --telemetry-sampler-ratio 1

Using Helm:

helm repo add nginx-stable https://helm.nginx.com/stable
helm repo update

helm install nsm nginx-stable/nginx-service-mesh --namespace nginx-mesh --create-namespace --wait --set prometheusAddress=prometheus.nsm-monitoring.svc:9090 --set telemetry.exporters.otlp.host=otel-collector.nsm-monitoring.svc --set telemetry.exporters.otlp.port=4317 --set telemetry.samplerRatio=1
Note:
A sampler ratio of 1 results in 100% of traces being sampled. Adjust this value (float from 0 to 1) to your needs.

View the Dashboards

To view the Prometheus dashboard:

kubectl -n nsm-monitoring port-forward svc/prometheus 9090

Visit http://localhost:9090

To view the Grafana dashboard:

kubectl -n nsm-monitoring port-forward svc/grafana 3000

Visit http://localhost:3000. Both the default username and password are “admin”.

To view the Jaeger dashboard:

kubectl -n nsm-monitoring port-forward svc/jaeger 16686

Visit http://localhost:16686

What’s Next

Deploy an Example App