Running Heartbeat on Kubernetes

Heartbeat Docker images can be used on Kubernetes to check resources uptime.

Tip

Running Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes? See Run Beats on ECK

However, version 9.0.0-beta1 of Heartbeat has not yet been released, so no Docker image is currently available for this version.

Kubernetes deploy manifests

A single Heartbeat can check for uptime of the whole cluster.

Everything is deployed under kube-system namespace, you can change that by updating the YAML file.

To get the manifests just run:

		curl -L -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/beats/master/deploy/kubernetes/heartbeat-kubernetes.yaml

	

Warning

If you are using Kubernetes 1.7 or earlier: Heartbeat uses a hostPath volume to persist internal data, it’s located under /var/lib/heartbeat-data. The manifest uses folder autocreation (DirectoryOrCreate), which was introduced in Kubernetes 1.8. You will need to remove type: DirectoryOrCreate from the manifest and create the host folder yourself.

Settings

Some parameters are exposed in the manifest to configure logs destination, by default they will use an existing Elasticsearch deploy if it’s present, but you may want to change that behavior, so just edit the YAML file and modify them:

		- name: ELASTICSEARCH_HOST
  value: elasticsearch
- name: ELASTICSEARCH_PORT
  value: "9200"
- name: ELASTICSEARCH_USERNAME
  value: elastic
- name: ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD
  value: changeme

	

Deploy

To deploy Heartbeat to Kubernetes just run:

kubectl create -f heartbeat-kubernetes.yaml

Then you should be able to check the status by running:

		$ kubectl --namespace=kube-system get deployment/heartbeat

NAME        READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
heartbeat   1/1     1            1           1m

Running Heartbeat as unprivileged user

Under Kubernetes, Heartbeat can run as a non-root user, but requires some privileged network capabilities to operate correctly. Ensure that the NET_RAW capability is available to the container.

		containers:
- name: heartbeat
  image: docker.elastic.co/beats/heartbeat:9.0.0-beta1
  securityContext:
    runAsUser: 1000
    runAsGroup: 1000
    capabilities:
      add: [ NET_RAW ]

	