Notify kubernetes events with botkube

#kubernetes #day2 #webhook

At Cisco we use Webex as our IM collaboration engine. It is same as Teams/Slack with communication capabilities. One can build a bot for interaction and use APIs to communicate with webex teams.
As a platform team we want to notify interested parties when events happen like pod creation, deployment rollout, pod errors ...
When exploring around I came across botkube which can help solve our problem to a major extent

Architecture

Source: https://www.botkube.io/architecture/

Modes of usage

Full fledged chatbot - integrations to Slack, Mattermost and MS Teams
Sink - to push events, used for datastores like Elasticsearch and webhooks for use-cases
Custom filters - for validations and recommendations

Install botkube

Prepare a webhook listener (<WEBHOOK_URL>)
Decide on a name for your cluster (any string: <CLUSTER_NAME>)
Get and update configuration values

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/infracloudio/botkube/v0.12.4/helm/botkube/sample-res-config.yaml
$ mv sample-res-config.yaml /path/to/config.yaml
$ vi /path/to/config.yaml

Install

$ helm repo add infracloudio https://infracloudio.github.io/charts
$ helm repo update
$ helm install --version v0.12.4 botkube --namespace botkube \
--set communications.webhook.enabled=true \
--set communications.webhook.url=<WEBHOOK_URL> \
--set config.settings.clustername=<CLUSTER_NAME> \
--set image.repository=infracloudio/botkube \
--set image.tag=v0.12.4 \
-f /path/to/config.yaml
infracloudio/botkube

Check the installation:

$ kubectl get-all -n botkube
NAME                                  NAMESPACE  AGE
configmap/botkube-configmap           botkube    6d22h
configmap/kube-root-ca.crt            botkube    6d22h
pod/botkube-785d6c889-srbzg           botkube    6d22h
secret/botkube-communication-secret   botkube    6d22h
secret/botkube-sa-token-btjvj         botkube    6d22h
secret/default-token-d5s9n            botkube    6d22h
secret/sh.helm.release.v1.botkube.v1  botkube    6d22h
serviceaccount/botkube-sa             botkube    6d22h
serviceaccount/default                botkube    6d22h
deployment.apps/botkube               botkube    6d22h
replicaset.apps/botkube-785d6c889     botkube    6d22h

get-all is a krew plugin

Usage

Now when identified events are triggered, webhook url is POSTed with an appropriate json payload

$ kubectl logs -n botkube pod/botkube-785d6c889-srbzg
...
INFO[2022-04-09T13:27:26Z] Registering resource lifecycle informer
INFO[2022-04-09T13:27:26Z] Adding informer for resource:apps/v1/deployments
INFO[2022-04-09T13:27:26Z] Adding informer for resource:apps/v1/statefulsets
INFO[2022-04-09T13:27:26Z] Adding informer for resource:apps/v1/daemonsets
INFO[2022-04-09T13:27:26Z] Adding informer for resource:v1/nodes
INFO[2022-04-09T13:27:26Z] Registering kubernetes events informer for types: warning
INFO[2022-04-09T13:27:26Z] Registering kubernetes events informer for types: normal
INFO[2022-04-09T13:27:26Z] Registering watcher on configfile /config/resource_config.yaml

Payloads will be like:

{
    "meta": {
        "cluster": "macbook-kind",
        "kind": "Deployment",
        "name": "test-dep4",
        "namespace": "default"
    },
    "status": {
        "level": "info",
        "type": "create"
    },
    "summary": "Deployment *default/test-dep4* has been created in *macbook-kind* cluster\n",
    "timestamp": "2022-04-12T00:38:15Z"
}

Conclusion

botkube is capable of a lot more including building a full-fledged chatbot for managing kubernetes cluster and provides extension points as well. Do check-out the documentation

There is another similar project called kubewatch, but not active anymore

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