Service Insight

The Service Insight feature is available only for F5 NGINX Plus. The F5 NGINX Ingress Controller exposes an endpoint which provides host statistics for services exposed using the VirtualServer (VS) and TransportServer (TS) resources.

It exposes data in JSON format and returns HTTP status codes.

The response body holds information about the total, down and the unhealthy number of upstream pods associated with the configured hostname. Returned HTTP codes indicate the health of the service.

The service is indicated as not healthy (HTTP response code different than 200 OK) if all upstreams (pods) are determined unhealthy by NGINX Plus. The service is healthy if at least one upstream pod is healthy as determined by NGINX Plus. In this case, the endpoint returns HTTP code 200 OK.

NGINX Plus determination of healthy can be tuned using advanced health checks, and also dynamically relate to pods responses and responsiveness. See Upstream Healthcheck https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-ingress-controller/configuration/virtualserver-and-virtualserverroute-resources/#upstream

Enabling Service Insight Endpoint

If you’re using Kubernetes manifests (Deployment or DaemonSet) to install the Ingress Controller, to enable the Service Insight endpoint:

  1. Run the Ingress Controller with the -enable-service-insight command-line argument. This will expose the Ingress Controller endpoint via paths /probe/{hostname} for Virtual Servers, and /probe/ts/{service_name} for Transport Servers on port 9114 (customizable with the -service-insight-listen-port command-line argument). The service_name parameter refers to the name of the deployed service (the service specified under upstreams in the transport server).

  2. To enable TLS for the Service Insight endpoint, configure the -service-insight-tls-secret cli argument with the namespace and name of a TLS Secret.

  3. Add the Service Insight port to the list of the ports of the Ingress Controller container in the template of the Ingress Controller pod:

    - name: service-insight
  containerPort: 9114

If you’re using Helm to install the Ingress Controller, to enable Service Insight endpoint, configure the serviceInsight.* parameters of the Helm chart. See the Installation with Helm doc.

Available Statistics and HTTP Response Codes

The Service Insight provides the following statistics:

  • Total number of VS or TS pods
  • Number of VS or TS pods in ‘Up’ state
  • Number of VS or TS pods in ‘Unhealthy’ state

These statistics are returned as JSON:

{ "Total": <int>, "Up": <int>, "Unhealthy": <int>  }

Response codes:

  • HTTP 200 OK - Service is healthy
  • HTTP 404 Not Found - No upstreams/VS/TS found for the requested hostname/name
  • HTTP 418 I’m a teapot - The service is down (All upstreams/VS/TS are “Unhealthy”)

Note: wildcards in hostnames are not supported at the moment.

Last modified October 2, 2024