Cloud Foundry Loggregator Firehose

Use this Splunk Observability Cloud integration for the Cloud Foundry Loggregator Firehose monitor. See benefits, install, configuration, and metrics

The Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector uses the Smart Agent receiver with the Cloud Foundry Loggregator Firehose monitor type to create a Cloud Foundry Firehose nozzle which connects to the Cloud Foundry Reverse Log Proxy (RLP) Gateway to extract metrics from Loggregator.

Note: To monitor Cloud Foundry with the OpenTelemetry Collector using native OpenTelemetry refer to the Cloud Foundry receiver component.

The following applies:

This integration is available on Linux only.
This integration uses the RLP Gateway model from Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) version 2.4 and doesn’t work with older releases.
The monitor supports gauge and counter metrics. Learn more at Metric types.

Benefits

After you configure the integration, you can access these features:

View metrics. You can create your own custom dashboards, and most monitors provide built-in dashboards as well. For information about dashboards, see View dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud.
View a data-driven visualization of the physical servers, virtual machines, AWS instances, and other resources in your environment that are visible to Infrastructure Monitoring. For information about navigators, see Use navigators in Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring.
Access the Metric Finder and search for metrics sent by the monitor. For information, see Search the Metric Finder and Metadata Catalog.

Installation

Follow these steps to deploy this integration:

Deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to your host or container platform:
- Install on Linux
Configure the monitor, as described in the Configuration section.
Restart the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.

Configuration

To use this integration of a Smart Agent monitor with the Collector:

Include the Smart Agent receiver in your configuration file.
Add the monitor type to the Collector configuration, both in the receiver and pipelines sections.
- See how to Use Smart Agent monitors with the Collector.
- See how to set up the Smart Agent receiver.
- For a list of common configuration options, refer to Common configuration settings for monitors.
- Learn more about the Collector at Get started: Understand and use the Collector.

Example

To activate this integration, add the following to your Collector configuration:

receivers:
  smartagent/cloudfoundry-firehose-nozzle
    type: cloudfoundry-firehose-nozzle
    ... # Additional config

Next, add the monitor to the service.pipelines.metrics.receivers section of your configuration file:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/cloudfoundry-firehose-nozzle]

Configuration settings

The following table shows the configuration options for this integration:


Option	Required	Type	Description
`rlpGatewayUrl`	no	`string`	The base URL to the RLP Gateway server. This is quite often of the form `https://log-stream.<CLOUD CONTROLLER SYSTEM DOMAIN>` if using PCF 2.4+.
`rlpGatewaySkipVerify`	no	`bool`	Whether to skip SSL/TLS verification when using HTTPS to connect to the RLP Gateway (default: `false`)
`uaaUser`	no	`string`	The UAA username for a user that has the appropriate authority to fetch logs from the Firehose (usually the `logs.admin` authority)
`uaaPassword`	no	`string`	The password for the above UAA user
`uaaUrl`	no	`string`	The URL to the UAA server. This monitor obtains an access token from this server that it uses to authenticate with the RLP Gateway.
`uaaSkipVerify`	no	`bool`	Whether to skip SSL/TLS verification when using HTTPS to connect to the UAA server (default: `false`)
`shardId`	no	`string`	The nozzle’s shard ID. All nozzle instances with the same ID receive an exclusive subset of the data from the Firehose. The default should suffice in the vast majority of use cases. (default: `signalfx_nozzle`)

PCF configuration

Most of PCF Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come through the Firehose. Refer to PCF documentation for more information on KPIs to determine when to scale up or down your cluster.

To create Cloud Foundry User Account and Authentication (UAA) user with the proper permissions to access the RLP Gateway, run the following command:

$ uaac client add my-v2-nozzle \
    --name signalfx-nozzle \
    --secret <signalfx-nozzle client secret> \
    --authorized_grant_types client_credentials,refresh_token \
    --authorities logs.admin

Set the uaaUsername config value to signalfx-nozzle and the uaaPassword field to the <signalfx-nozzle client secret> that you select.

Metrics

The gauge and counter metrics are collected from PCF Platform apps and platform components in the following way:

Firehose gauge metrics are converted to Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring gauges.
Firehose counter metrics are converted to Infrastructure Monitoring cumulative counters metrics.
All of the tags in the Firehose envelopes are converted to dimensions when sending to Infrastructure Monitoring.

The following metrics are available for this integration:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector/main/internal/signalfx-agent/pkg/monitors/cloudfoundry/metadata.yaml

Notes

To learn more about the available in Splunk Observability Cloud see Metric types.
In host-based subscription plans, default metrics are those metrics included in host-based subscriptions in Splunk Observability Cloud, such as host, container, or bundled metrics. Custom metrics are not provided by default and might be subject to charges. See Metric categories for more information.
In MTS-based subscription plans, all metrics are custom.
To add additional metrics, see how to configure extraMetrics in Add additional metrics.

## Troubleshooting

If you are a Splunk Observability Cloud customer and are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, you can get help in the following ways.

Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers

Submit a case in the Splunk Support Portal.
Contact Splunk Support.

Available to prospective customers and free trial users

Ask a question and get answers through community support at Splunk Answers.
Join the Splunk #observability user group Slack channel to communicate with customers, partners, and Splunk employees worldwide. To join, see Chat groups.

Documentation