How to - profile a Canonical Kubernetes cluster with parca-agent

mmkay · 13 February 2025 11:22

You can use parca-agent, part of Charmed Parca to gather profiles from a Canonical Kubernetes cluster. This document describes how.

This document assumes you already have deployed Canonical Kubernetes either from a snap or as a charm. It also assumes you have already deployed Parca alongside with COS-Lite. If you haven’t done so, see more: How to deploy Charmed Parca on top of COS-Lite

Get profiles from a charmed Canonical Kubernetes cluster

In the model where Parca is deployed, create an offer for the parca-store endpoint:

juju offer parca:parca-store-endpoint parca-store

Switch to the machine model where Canonical Kubernetes is deployed, consume the offer you just created:

juju consume k8s:admin/cos.parca-store

Then deploy parca-agent:

juju deploy parca-agent --channel edge

And integrate:

juju integrate parca-agent parca-store
juju integrate parca-agent k8s

Now open grafana in a browser (in the cos model, run juju run grafana/leader get-admin-password). In Grafana’s Explore view, select the Parca datasource and verify there’s parca_agent in the profiles tab. If you deployed COS on the same Kubernetes cluster that is being profiled, you should be able to see profiles from each of the applications that parca can natively instrument:

If you don’t see any profiles from parca-agent, check if your machine has all the requirements from How to autoinstrument machine workloads with parca-agent . If it does and you still don’t receive any profiles, check juju debug-log on the parca-agent charm and consider reaching out to us on Matrix or creating an issue in parca-agent-operator.

Get profiles from a Canonical Kubernetes cluster deployed from a snap

As the parca-agent charm is a machine charm subordinate, you need to use the parca-agent snap directly to scrape profiles from a snapped Canonical Kubernetes cluster.

On the machine where Kubernetes snap is running, install the parca-agent snap:

sudo snap install parca-agent --classic --channel edge

Then configure it to point at parca’s remote store address. You can find it by running juju status on the k8s model where parca is deployed:

$ juju status
Model       Controller  Cloud/Region        Version  SLA          Timestamp
test-parca  microk8s    microk8s/localhost  3.6.2    unsupported  12:13:14+01:00

App           Version  Status  Scale  Charm             Channel      Rev  Address         Exposed  Message
(...)   
parca                  active      1  parca-k8s                        0  10.152.183.105  no       UI ready at http://10.211.88.200:7994

Use the same IP address, but at port 7993 for the store address:

sudo parca-agent --node="k8s" --remote-store-address="10.211.88.200:7993" --remote-store-insecure

Observe in Grafana that the profiles from parca-agent are available in the Parca datasource: