Telemeter

Telemeter is a set of components used for OpenShift remote health monitoring. It allows OpenShift clusters to push telemetry data about clusters to Red Hat, as Prometheus metrics.

telemeter-server needs to receive and send metrics across multiple security boundaries, and thus needs to perform several authentication, authorization and data integrity checks. It (currently) has two endpoints via which it receives metrics and forwards them to an upstream service as a Prometheus remote write request.

/upload endpoint (receive metrics in []client_model.MetricFamily format from telemeter-client, currently used by CMO)

Telemeter implements a Prometheus federation push client and server to allow isolated Prometheus instances that cannot be scraped from a central Prometheus to instead perform authorized push federation to a central location.

The telemeter-client is deployed via the OpenShift Cluster Monitoring Operator and performs a certain set of actions via a forwarder.Worker every 4 minutes and 30 seconds (by default).

1. On initialization, telemeter-client sends a POST request to the /authorize endpoint of telemeter-server with its configured token (configured via --to-token/to-token-file) as a auth header and the cluster ID as an id request query param (configured via --id). It exchanges the token for a JWT token from this endpoint and also receives a set of labels to include as well. Each client is uniquely identified by a cluster ID and all metrics federated are labelled with that ID. For more details on /authorize see section.
2. It caches this token and labels in tokenStore and returns a HTTP roundtripper. The roundtripper checks validity and of the cached token and refreshes it before attaching it to any request it sends to telemeter-server.
3. telemeter-client sends a GET request to the /federate endpoint of the in-cluster Prometheus instance, and scrapes all metrics (authenticates via --from-ca-file + --from-token/from-token-file). It retrieves the metrics from the response body and parses it into a []*client_model.MetricFamily type. You can even use --match arguments to match rules while federating.
4. telemeter-client performs some transformations on these collected metrics, to anonymize them, rename them and to add labels provided by the roundtripper tokenStore and CLI args.
5. telemeter-client then encodes the metrics (of type []*client_model.MetricFamily) into a POST request body and sends it to the /upload endpoint of telemeter-server, thereby "pushing" metrics.

The telemeter-server upon receiving a request at the /upload endpoint, does the following,

1. It authorizes the request by inspecting the JWT token attached in the auth header, via the authorize.NewAuthorizeClientHandler which uses jwt.clientAuthorizer struct that implements the authorize.ClientAuthorizer interface, to uniqely identify the telemeter-client.
2. If successfully identified, it passes authorize.Client into the request context, from which cluster ID is extracted later on via server.ClusterID middleware.
3. It then checks if the cluster that the request came from, is under the configured request rate limit.
4. If the request in under rate limits, telemeter-server validates/transforms those metrics encoded in the request, by checking request body size, applying whitelist label matcher rules, elide labels (configured via --whitelist and --elide-label) and clusterID labels. It also overwrites all the timestamps that came with the metric families and records the drift, if any.
5. The server then converts the received metric families to []prompb.TimeSeries. During conversion however it drops all the timestamps again and overwrites that with current timestamp. It then marshals that into a Prometheus remote write request and forwards that to the Observatorium API, with an oauth2.Client (configured via OIDC flags) which attaches the correct auth header token after hitting SSO.

/authorize (for telemeter-client)

telemeter-server implements an authorization endpoint for telemeter-client which does the following,

1. telemeter-server uses jwt.NewAuthorizeClusterHandler which accepts POST requests, having a auth header token and a "id" query param.
2. This handler uses tollbooth.NewAuthorizer which implements the authorize.ClusterAuthorizer interface, to authorize that particular cluster. It uses authorize.AgainstEndpoint to send the cluster ID and token as a POST request to the authorization server (configured via --authorize). The authorization server returns a 200 status code, if the cluster is identified correctly.
3. tollbooth.AuthorizeCluster returns a subject which is used as the client identifier in a generated signed JWT which is returned to the telemeter-client, along with any labels.

/metrics/v1/receive endpoint (receive metrics in prompb.WriteRequest format from any client)

telemeter-server also supports receiving remote write requests directly from in-cluster Prometheus (or any Prometheus with the appropriate auth header). In this case, telemeter-client is no longer needed.

Any client sending a remote write request will need to attach a composite token as an auth header to the request, so that telemeter-server can identify which cluster that request belongs to. You can generate the token via the following,

CLUSTER_ID="$(oc get clusterversion -o jsonpath='{.items[].spec.clusterID}{"\n"}')" && \
AUTH="$(oc get secret pull-secret -n openshift-config --template='{{index .data ".dockerconfigjson" | base64decode}}' | jq '.auths."cloud.openshift.com"'.auth)" && \
echo -n "{'authorization_token':$AUTH,'cluster_id':$CLUSTER_ID}" | base64 -w 0

The client will also be responsible for ensuring that all metrics sent will have the _id (cluster ID) label. Sending metric metadata is not supported.

Upon receiving a request at this endpoint, telemeter-server does the following,

1. telemeter-server parses the bearer token (decodes base64 JSON with "cluster_id" and "authorization_token" fields) via authorize.NewHandler
2. It then sends this as a POST request against the authorization server (configured via --authorize) using authorize.AgainstEndpoint. The authorization server returns a 200 status code, if the cluster is identified correctly.
3. telemeter-server then checks the request body size and if all metrics in the remote write request have the cluster ID label (_id by default). It also drops metrics which do not match whitelist label matchers and elides labels (configured via --whitelist and --elide-label).
4. It then forwards that to the Observatorium API, with an oauth2.Client (configured via OIDC flags) which attaches the correct auth header token after hitting SSO.

This is planned to be adopted by CMO.

note: Telemeter is alpha and may change significantly

Get started

To see this in action, run

make test-integration

The command launches a two instance telemeter-server cluster and a single telemeter-client to talk to that server, along with a Prometheus instance running on http://localhost:9090 that shows the federated metrics. The client will scrape metrics from the local Prometheus, then send those to the telemeter-server, which will then forward metrics to Thanos Receive, which can be queried via a Thanos Querier.

To build binaries, run

make build

To execute the unit test suite, run

make test-unit

Adding new metrics to send via telemeter

Docs on the process on why and how to send these metrics are available here.