Installing Weave Scope into Kubernetes

In a previous post I installed a k8s cluster using kubeadm.

Now I would like to add the Weave Scope application to the cluster so that I can visualize what is going on. I should note that I first saw Scope used in a presentation regarding OpenStack Helm. (Yeah, that’s right, using k8s to manage the OpenStack control plane.)

Weave Scope allows you to:

See your Docker hosts, containers and services in real time. Easily identify and correct issues to ensure the stability and performance of your containerized applications.

Installation

Basically it’s just a matter of getting the command correct. There are official docs on how to install Weave Scope.

$ kubectl --kubeconfig ./admin.conf apply --namespace kube-system -f "https://cloud.weave.works/k8s/scope.yaml?k8s-service-type=NodePort&k8s-version=$(kubectl --kubeconfig ./admin.conf version | base64 | tr -d '\n')"

Note that I added the k8s-service-type=NodePort.

After a few seconds we can validate the deployment:

root@k8s-1:/etc/kubernetes# kubectl --kubeconfig ./admin.conf -n kube-system get svc
NAME              CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)         AGE
kube-dns          10.96.0.10      <none>        53/UDP,53/TCP   2h
weave-scope-app   10.111.34.232   <nodes>       80:31863/TCP    1h

Above we can see what port it’s on, in this case 31863. Note that I’m not exporting this service in any fashion right now, to use Scope I’m connecting my browser directly to node:31863.

sock-shop

In the previous post I deployed sock-shop.

Here’s a view from Weave Scope of the sock-shop namespace.

More Images

There are all kinds of handy tools.

The Internet.

Processes.

I’m leaving a lot out.

Conclusion

I usually don’t reach for visualization tools, but with k8s it was helpful to get a picture of what’s going on. Plus, it’s so simple to install. I really like how services like this are installed into the kube-system namespace, a form of self-hosting. It’s a great model.