Docs » Available host and application monitors » Configure application receivers for cloud platforms » Kong Gateway

Kong Gateway 🔗

Description 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector provides this integration as the kong monitor type with the SignalFx Smart Agent receiver. This monitor requires version 0.11.2+ of Kong and version 0.0.1+ of kong-plugin-signalfx.

Note

This monitor is not available on Windows as collectd plugins are only supported in Linux and Kubernetes.

The Kong integration provides service traffic metrics using kong-plugin-signalfx, which emits metrics for configurable request and response lifecycle groups, including:

  • Counters for response counts

  • Counters for cumulative response and request sizes

  • Counters for cumulative request, upstream, and Kong latencies

You can partition request and response lifecycle groups by:

  • API or Service Name/ID

  • Route ID

  • Request HTTP Method

  • Response HTTP Status Code

In addition, the integration provides system-wide connection statistics, including:

  • A counter for total fielded requests

  • Gauges for active connections and their various states

  • A gauge for database connectivity

This integration is only supported for Kong Gateway Community Edition (CE).

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 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 Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring navigators.

  • Access the Metric Finder and search for metrics sent by the monitor. For information, see Use the Metric Finder.

Installation 🔗

This monitor is available in the Smart Agent Receiver, which is part of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector. You need both the kong-plugin-signalfx Kong plugin and the kong SignalFx monitor to activate this integration.

Follow these steps to deploy the integration:

  1. Run the following commands on each Kong server with a configured LUA_PATH:

    luarocks install kong-plugin-signalfx
# Or directly from the source repo
git clone git@github.com:signalfx/kong-plugin-signalfx.git
cd kong-plugin-signalfx
luarocks make
# Then notify Kong of the plugin or add to your existing configuration file
echo 'custom_plugins = signalfx' > /etc/kong/signalfx.conf

  2. Add the following lua_shared_dict memory declarations to the NGINX configuration file of Kong, or add them directly to /usr/local/share/lua/5.1/kong/templates/nginx_kong.lua if you are using Kong default setup:

    lua_shared_dict kong_signalfx_aggregation 10m;
lua_shared_dict kong_signalfx_locks 100k;

  3. Reload Kong to make the plugin available and install it globally:

    kong reload -c /etc/kong/signalfx.conf  # Or specify your modified configuration file
curl -X POST -d "name=signalfx" http://localhost:8001/plugins

  4. Deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to your host or container platform.

  5. Configure the monitor, as described in the next section.

Configuration 🔗

To activate this monitor in the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, add the following to your configuration:

receivers:
  smartagent/kong:
    type: collectd/kong
    ...  # Additional config

To complete the monitor activation, you must also include the smartagent/kong receiver item in a metrics pipeline. To do this, add the receiver item to the service > pipelines > metrics > receivers section of your configuration file. For example:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [smartagent/kong]

Configuration settings 🔗

The following is a sample configuration:

receivers:
  smartagent/kong:
   type: collectd/kong
   host: 127.0.0.1
   port: 8001
   metrics:
    - metric: request_latency
      report: true
    - metric: connections_accepted
      report: false

The following is a sample configuration with custom /signalfx route and filter lists:

receivers:
  smartagent/kong:
    type: collectd/kong
    host: 127.0.0.1
    port: 8443
    url: https://127.0.0.1:8443/routed_signalfx
    authHeader:
      header: Authorization
      value: HeaderValue
    metrics:
      - metric: request_latency
        report: true
    reportStatusCodeGroups: true
    statusCodes:
      - 202
      - 403
      - 405
      - 419
      - "5*"
    serviceNamesBlacklist:
      - "*SomeService*"

Kong configuration 🔗

Like most Kong plugins, you can configure the SignalFx kong integration globally or by specific service, route, API, or consumer object contexts by making POST requests to each plugins endpoint. For example:

curl -X POST -d "name=signalfx" http://localhost:8001/services/<my_service>/plugins
curl -X POST -d "name=signalfx" http://localhost:8001/routes/<my_route_id>/plugins

For each request made to the respective registered object context, the kong integration obtains metric content and aggregates it for automated retrieval at the /signalfx endpoint of the Admin API. Although you can activate request contexts for specific Consumer objects, consumer IDs or unique visitor metrics are not calculated.

By default, the kong integration aggregates metrics by a context determined by the HTTP method of the request and by the status code of the response. If you’re monitoring a large infrastructure with hundreds of routes, grouping by HTTP method might be too granular. You can deactivate context grouping by setting aggregate_by_http_method to false:

curl -X POST -d "name=signalfx" -d "config.aggregate_by_http_method=false" http://localhost:8001/plugins
# or to edit an existing plugin
curl -X PATCH -d "config.aggregate_by_http_method=false" http://localhost:8001/plugins/<sfx_plugin_id>

Metrics 🔗

These metrics are available for this integration.

Get help 🔗

If you are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, try these tips:

To learn about even more support options, see Splunk Customer Success.