Chapter 18. Container Entities

This chapter provides information on managing resources on your containers providers.

18.1. The Containers Overview Page

The containers overview page shows information on all containers providers and entities known to CloudForms. The Overview page provides links to other summary pages which contain further information on the containers providers and entities. The Overview page also provides metrics for Aggregated Node Utilization, Network Utilization Trend, New Image Usage Trend, Node Utilization, and Pod Creation and Deletion Trends.

Containers Overview

Working with the Containers Overview Page

  1. Navigate to Compute → Containers → Overview.
  2. Click the desired containers entity, or provider, if applicable, for viewing the summary with further information.
Note

To reliably associate pods and images, CloudForms requires information from the docker-pullable field, added in OpenShift 3.3.1.2. This can affect the results of the Chargeback by Image report for older OpenShift providers, and potentially cause image inspection (done as part of Smart State Analysis) to fail due to associating a container to the wrong image. Consequently, CloudForms may not report accurate information about pods and images in OpenShift providers before version 3.3.1.2.

18.2. Viewing a Container Entity Summary

Container entity (object) summaries are found at Compute → Containers → Entity, where you can view information about container entities and their components.

Viewing a Containers Provider Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Providers to view information on different aspects of a containers provider. The summary includes:

  • The status of the provider and its components.

  • The relationships between different entities of the containers provider. These relationships are summarized in the Relationships box on the right-hand side of the summary page.

    Entity Relationships

  • Additional information on aggregated capacity of all CPU cores of all nodes, and aggregated capacity of all memory of all nodes.
Viewing a Container Nodes Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Container Nodes to view information on different aspects of a container node. The summary includes:

  • The number of entities on a node.
  • A node’s capacity and utilization.
  • The version of the underlying operating system and software.

To view the timeline of events for a node from a container nodes summary page, click Monitoring (Monitoring), and then Timelines (Timelines).

Viewing a Containers Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Containers to view information on different aspects of a container. The summary includes:

  • The relationships of the container to a related node, pod, or image.
  • The node the container runs on.
  • The container ID.
  • Properties of the container image, such as name, tag, etc.
Viewing a Container Images Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Container Images to view information on different aspects of a container image. The summary includes:

  • The containers currently using the images.
  • The image registry the image is from.
Viewing an Image Registries Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Image Registries to view information on different aspects of an image registry. The summary includes:

  • Which images are from the registry.
  • The number of images that come from that registry.
  • Which containers use images from that registry.
  • The host and port of the registry.
Viewing a Pods Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Pods to view information on different aspects of a pod. The summary includes:

  • The containers that are part of the pod.
  • The services that reference the pod.
  • The node the pod runs on.
  • If the pod controlled by a replicator.
  • The IP address of the pod.
Viewing a Replicators Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Replicators to view information on different aspects of a replicator. The summary includes:

  • The number of requested pods.
  • The number of current pods.
  • The labels and selector for the replicator.
Viewing a Container Services Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Container Services to view information on different aspects of a container service. The summary includes:

  • The pods that the container service provide traffic to.
  • The port configurations for the container service.
  • The labels and selector for the container service.
Viewing a Volumes Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Volumes to view information on the persistent volumes of a container provider. The summary includes:

  • The pods the volume is connected to.
  • The volume’s connection parameters.
  • The volume’s storage capacity.
  • The volume’s iSCSI target details (if applicable).
Viewing a Container Builds Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Container Builds to view different aspects of a container build. The summary includes:

  • The build configuration the container build is based on.
  • Which build instances have been created.
  • Which phase in the build process the instance has completed.
  • Which pod a build instance reside in.
Viewing a Container Templates Summary

Navigate to Compute → Containers → Container Templates to view different aspects of a container template. The summary includes:

  • The project the template is associated with.
  • The objects the template contains.
  • The parameters that can be used with the template’s objects.
  • The template’s version number.

18.3. Using the Topology Widget

The Topology widget is an interactive topology graph, showing the status and relationships between the different entities of the containers providers and projects to which Red Hat CloudForms has access.

  • The topology graph includes pods, containers, services, nodes, virtual machines, hosts, routes, and replicators within the overall containers provider environment.
  • Each entity in the graph displays a color indication of its status.
  • Hovering over any individual graph element will display a summary of details for the individual element.
  • Double-click the entities in the graph to navigate to their summary pages.
  • It is possible to drag elements to reposition the graph.
  • Click the legend at the top of the graph to show or hide entities.
  • Click Display Names on the right-hand side of the page to show or hide entity names.

18.3.1. Viewing the Topology for Container Providers

  1. Navigate to Compute → Containers → Providers.
  2. Click the desired containers provider for viewing the provider summary.
  3. On the provider summary page, click Topology in the Overview box on the right side of the page.

18.3.2. Viewing the Topology for Container Provider Projects

The project topology page displays the project as the center node, surrounded by its related entities.

  1. Navigate to Compute → Containers → Projects.
  2. Click on a project.
  3. On the project summary page, click Topology View button (Topology View) on the top right side of the page.

18.3.3. Limiting the Number of Containers Shown in the Topology View

  1. Navigate to the settings menu, then My Settings, and click on the Visual tab.
  2. Select the number of container items from the drop-down under Topology Default Items in View.
  3. Click Save.

18.4. Analyzing Container Images with SmartState Analysis

Perform a SmartState Analysis of a container image to inspect the packages included in an image.

Running a SmartState Analysis

  1. Navigate to Compute → Containers → Container Images.
  2. Check the container image to analyze. You can check multiple images.
  3. Click Configuration (Configuration), and then Perform SmartState Analysis (Perform SmartState Analysis).

The container image is scanned. The process will copy over any required files for the image. After reloading the image page, all new or updated packages are listed.

To monitor the status of container image SmartState Analysis tasks, navigate to the settings menu, then Tasks. The status of each task is displayed including time started, time ended, what part of the task is currently running, and any errors encountered.

Note

See Scanning Container Images in CloudForms with OpenSCAP for details on scanning container images using OpenSCAP policies.

18.5. Configuring Automatic Tagging for Container Entities

Container object labels in OpenShift can be used to automatically create tags and tag categories in Red Hat CloudForms. This is done by mapping Red Hat CloudForms tags to existing OpenShift or Kubernetes labels.

Labels from OpenShift can be mapped to Red Hat CloudForms tags for the following container entities:

  • Projects
  • Nodes
  • Routes
  • Replicators
  • Container services
  • Pods
  • Container builds
Note

Tags automatically created from OpenShift labels are completely managed by the Red Hat CloudForms system and cannot be manually assigned or unassigned. Deleting a mapping rule from Red Hat CloudForms immediately deletes the resulting tags.

You can view a container entity’s OpenShift labels on the entity’s details page under Labels.

The following example shows how to configure tagging for a node, but the same steps can be used for mapping labels to tags on other container entities.

To configure automatic tagging on container entities using labels:

  1. Note the key of the OpenShift label you want to map to a Red Hat CloudForms tag. OpenShift labels consist of two parts: a key and a value.

    1. Navigate to Compute → Containers → Nodes.
    2. Select a node to open its summary page.

    3. Under Labels, note the label(s) to map to Red Hat CloudForms tag(s). Any OpenShift labels will list the key in the left column of the Labels table, and the value in the right column of the Labels table.

      This node has six labels (key/value pairs) that were created in OpenShift and collected in the Red Hat CloudForms inventory:

      OCPnode summary

      Note

      To create an OpenShift label, see Developer CLI Operations in the OpenShift Container Platform CLI Reference guide. A new label added in OpenShift will only show up in Red Hat CloudForms after the next OpenShift provider refresh.

  2. Navigate to Configuration and select the region.
  3. Click the Map Tags tab.

  4. Click Add to create a new mapping rule.

    1. Select a container entity to tag from the Entity list, or select <All> to tag all entities.
    2. Specify the key from the OpenShift label you noted earlier in the Label field.

    3. Specify a Red Hat CloudForms tag category in Category to map the label to. If the tag category does not exist yet in Red Hat CloudForms, it will be created automatically.

      Add label mapping

    4. Click Add. The mapping will show in the table on the Map Tags tab.

  5. Refresh the provider to complete the mapping:

    1. Navigate to Compute → Containers → Providers.
    2. Select the provider to refresh.
    3. Click 1847 (Configuration), and then 2003 (Refresh Items and Relationships).

The label will display on the entity’s summary page under Smart Management under Company Tags as <Category> : <value>.

OCP autotagged

Any container entity with the OpenShift zone label will be tagged automatically as category1 in Red Hat CloudForms. If the value for zone is south, for example, the entity will be tagged as category1 : south.

You can use these tags to create reports. See Monitoring, Alerts, and Reporting for details on creating reports.