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Add a guide to metrics for monitoring Teleport (#46645)
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* Add a guide to metrics for monitoring Teleport

Closes #40664

This change turns the Metrics guide in `admin-guides` into a conceptual
guide to the most important metrics for monitoring a Teleport cluster.

Since Agent metrics have inconsistent comprehensiveness across Teleport
services--and to reduce the scope of this change--this guide focuses on
self-hosted clusters.

To make this a conceptual guide instead of a reference, this change
removes the reference table from the `admin-guides` metrics page. There
is already a table in the dedicated metrics reference guide.

Note that, while the new metrics guide is specific to self-hosted
clusters, this change does not move the guide to the subsection of Admin
Guides related to self-hosting Teleport. Doing this would mean having
one subsection of Admin Guides for diagnostics-related guides and one
subsection for self-hosted-specific diagnostics, which is potentially
confusing. We may also want to add Agent-specific metrics eventually.

Finally, this change does not include alert thresholds for the metrics
it describes. We can define these in a subsequent change.

* Respond to evanfreed feedback

- Describe `backend_write_requests_failed_precondition_total`
- Include the precondition metric in the write availability formula.
- Turn the `registered_servers` discussion into a discussion of Teleport
  instance version, since it's not possible to group this metric by
  service and subtract the count of Auth Service/Proxy Service instances
  from the count of all registered services.
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ptgott authored and mvbrock committed Oct 16, 2024
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Showing 1 changed file with 190 additions and 10 deletions.
200 changes: 190 additions & 10 deletions docs/pages/admin-guides/management/diagnostics/metrics.mdx
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---
title: Metrics
description: How to enable and consume metrics
title: Key Metrics for Self-Hosted Clusters
description: Describes important metrics to monitor if you are self-hosting Teleport.
tocDepth: 3
---

Teleport exposes metrics for all of its components, helping you get insight
into the state of your cluster. This guide explains the metrics that you can
collect from your Teleport cluster.
This guide explains the metrics you should use to get started monitoring your
self-hosted Teleport cluster, focusing on metrics reported by the Auth Service
and Proxy Service. If you use Teleport Enterprise (Cloud), the Teleport team
monitors and responds to these metrics for you.

For a reference of all available metrics, see the [Teleport Metrics
Reference](../../../reference/monitoring/metrics.mdx).

This guide assumes that you already monitor compute resources on all instances
that run the Teleport Auth Service and Proxy Service (e.g., CPU, memory, disk,
bandwidth, and open file descriptors).

## Enabling metrics

Expand All @@ -14,12 +23,183 @@ collect from your Teleport cluster.
This will enable the `http://127.0.0.1:3000/metrics` endpoint, which serves the
metrics that Teleport tracks. It is compatible with [Prometheus](https://prometheus.io/) collectors.

The following metrics are available:
## Backend operations

A Teleport cluster cannot function if the Auth Service does not have a healthy
cluster state backend. You need to track the ability of the Auth Service to read
from and write to its backend.

The Auth Service can connect to [several possible
backends](../../../reference/backends.mdx). In addition to Teleport backend
metrics, you should set up monitoring for your backend of choice so that, if
these metrics show problematic values, you can correlate them with metrics on
your backend infrastructure.

### Backend operation throughput and availability

On each backend operation, the Auth Service increments a metric. Backend
operation metrics have the following format:

```text
teleport_backend_<METRIC_NAME>[_failed]_total
```

If an operation results in an error, the Auth Service adds the `_failed` segment
to the metric name. For example, successfully creating a record increments the
`teleport_backend_write_requests_total` metric. If the create operation fails,
the Auth Service increments `teleport_backend_write_requests_failed_total`
instead.

The following backend operation metrics are available:

|Operation|Incremented metric name|
|---|---|
|Create an item|`write_requests`|
|Modify an item, creating it if it does not exist|`write_requests`|
|Update an item|`write_requests`|
|Conditionally update an item if versions match|`write_requests`|
|List a range of items|`batch_read_requests`|
|Get a single item|`read_requests`|
|Compare and swap items|`write_requests`|
|Delete an item|`write_requests`|
|Conditionally delete an item if versions match|`write_requests`|
|Write a batch of updates atomically, failing the write if any update fails|Both `write_requests` and `atomic_write_requests`|
|Delete a range of items|`batch_write_requests`|
|Update the keepalive status of an item|`write_requests`|

During failed backend writes, a Teleport process also increments the
`backend_write_requests_failed_precondition_total` metric if the cause of the
failure is expected. For example, the metric increments during a create
operation if a record already exists, during an update or delete operation if
the record is not found, and during an atomic write if the resource was modified
concurrently. All of these conditions can hold in a well-functioning Teleport
cluster.

`backend_write_requests_failed_precondition_total` increments whenever
`backend_write_requests_failed_total` increments, and you can use it to
distinguish potentially expected write failures from unexpected, problematic
ones.

You can use backend operation metrics to define an availability formula, i.e.,
the percentage of reads or writes that succeeded. For example, in Prometheus,
you can define a query similar to the following. This takes the percentage of
write requests that failed for unexpected reasons and subtracts it from 1 to get
a percentage of successful writes:

```
1- (sum(rate(backend_write_requests_failed_total -sum(rate(teleport_backend_write_requests_failed_precondition_total)) / sum(rate(backend_write_requests_total))
```

If your backend begins to appear unavailable, you can investigate your backend
infrastructure.

### Backend operation performance

To help you track backend operation performance, the Auth Service also exposes
Prometheus [histogram metrics](https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/histograms/)
for read and write operations:

- `teleport_backend_read_seconds_bucket`
- `teleport_backend_write_seconds_bucket`
- `teleport_backend_batch_write_seconds_bucket`
- `teleport_backend_batch_read_seconds_bucket`
- `teleport_backend_atomic_write_seconds_bucket`

The backend throughput metrics discussed in the previous section map on to
latency metrics. Whenever the Auth Service increments one of the throughput
metrics, it reports one of the corresponding latency metrics. See the table
below for which throughput metrics map to which latency metrics. Each metric
name excludes the standard prefixes and suffixes.

|Throughput|Latency|
|---|---|
|`read_requests`|`read_seconds_bucket`|
|`read_requests`|`write_seconds_bucket`|
|`batch_read_requests`|`batch_write_seconds_bucket`|
|`batch_write_requests`|`batch_read_seconds_bucket`|
|`atomic_write_requests`|`atomic_write_seconds_bucket`|

## Agents and connected resources

To enable users to access most infrastructure with Teleport, you must join a
[Teleport Agent](../../../enroll-resources/agents/agents.mdx) to your Teleport
cluster and configure it to proxy your infrastructure. In a typical setup, an
Agent establishes an SSH reverse tunnel with the Proxy Service. User traffic to
Teleport-protected resources flows through the Proxy Service, an Agent, and
finally the infrastructure resource the Agent proxies. Return traffic from the
resource takes this path in reverse.

### Number of connected resources by type

Teleport-connected resources periodically send heartbeat (keepalive) messages to
the Auth Service. The Auth Service uses these heartbeats to track the number of
Teleport-protected resources by type with the `teleport_connected_resources`
metric.

The Auth Service tracks this metric for the following resources:

- SSH servers
- Kubernetes clusters
- Applications
- Databases
- Teleport Database Service instances
- Windows desktops

You can use this metric to:
- Compare the number of resources that are protected by Teleport with those that
are not so you can plan your Teleport rollout, e.g., by configuring [Auto
Discovery](../../../enroll-resources/auto-discovery/auto-discovery.mdx).
- Correlate changes in Teleport usage with resource utilization on Auth Service
and Proxy Service compute instances to determine scaling needs.

You can include this query in your Grafana configuration to break this metric
down by resource type:

```text
sum(teleport_connected_resources) by (type)
```

### Reverse tunnels by type

Every Teleport service that starts up establishes an SSH reverse tunnel to the
Proxy Service. (Self-hosted clusters can configure Agent services to connect to
the Auth Service directly without establishing a reverse tunnel.) The Proxy
Service tracks the number of reverse tunnels using the metric,
`teleport_reverse_tunnels_connected`.

With an improperly scaled Proxy Service pool, the Proxy Service can become a
bottleneck for traffic to Teleport-protected resources. If Proxy Service
instances display heavy utilization of compute resources while the number of
connected infrastructure resources is high, you can consider scaling out your
Proxy Service pool and using [Proxy Peering](../operations/proxy-peering.mdx).

Use the following Grafana query to track the maximum number of reverse tunnels
by type over a given interval:

```text
max(teleport_reverse_tunnels_connected) by (type))
```

## Teleport instance versions

At regular intervals (around 7 seconds with jitter), the Auth Service refreshes
its count of registered Teleport instances, including Agents and Teleport
processes that run the Auth Service and Proxy Service. You can measure this
count with the metric, `teleport_registered_servers`. To get the number of
registered instances by version, you can use this query in Grafana:

<Notice scope={["cloud"]} type="tip">
```text
sum by (version)(teleport_registered_servers)
```

Teleport Cloud does not expose monitoring endpoints for the Auth Service and Proxy Service.
You can use this metric to tell how many of your registered Teleport instances
are behind the version of the Auth Service and Proxy Service, which can help you
identify any that are at risk of violating the Teleport [version compatibility
guarantees](../../../upgrading/overview.mdx).

</Notice>
We strongly encourage self-hosted Teleport users to enroll their Agents in
automatic updates. You can track the count of Teleport Agents that are not
enrolled in automatic updates using the metric, `teleport_enrolled_in_upgrades`.
[Read the documentation](../../../upgrading/automatic-agent-updates.mdx) for how
to enroll Agents in automatic updates.

(!docs/pages/includes/metrics.mdx!)

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