ℹ️  SignalFx was acquired by Splunk in October 2019. See Splunk SignalFx for more information.

SignalFx Kong Plugin

This Kong plugin is intended for SignalFx users to obtain performance metrics from their Kong deployments for aggregation and reporting via the Smart Agent or the collectd-kong collectd plugin. It works similarly to other Kong logging plugins and provides connection state and request/response count, latency, status, and size metrics available through a /signalfx Admin API endpoint.

Note: This integration is only supported for Kong Gateway Community Edition (CE).

Installation

To install this plugin from its source repository, run the following on each Kong server with a properly configured LUA_PATH:

luarocks install kong-plugin-signalfx
# or directly from the source repo
git clone [email protected]:signalfx/kong-plugin-signalfx.git
cd kong-plugin-signalfx
luarocks make

# and be sure to notify Kong of the plugin

echo 'custom_plugins = signalfx' > /etc/kong/signalfx.conf  # or add to your existing configuration file

The following lua_shared_dict memory declarations will need to be made in your Kong's nginx configuration file or can be added directly to /usr/local/share/lua/5.1/kong/templates/nginx_kong.lua (or its actual location on your system) if you are using Kong's default setup.

lua_shared_dict kong_signalfx_aggregation 10m;
lua_shared_dict kong_signalfx_locks 100k;

Reload Kong to make the plugin available and (if desired) install it globally:

kong reload -c /etc/kong/signalfx.conf  # or specify your modified configuration file
curl -X POST -d "name=signalfx" http://localhost:8001/plugins

Configuration

Like most Kong plugins, the SignalFx plugin can be configured globally or by specific Service, Route, API, and Consumer object contexts by making POST requests to each desired Kong object's related plugins endpoint.

curl -X POST -d "name=signalfx" http://localhost:8001/services/MyService/plugins
curl -X POST -d "name=signalfx" http://localhost:8001/routes/<my_route_id>/plugins

For each request made to the respective registered object context, metric content will be obtained and aggregated for automated retrieval at the /signalfx endpoint of the Admin API. Though request contexts can be enabled for specific Consumer objects, please note that Consumer ID's or unique visitor metrics are not calculated at this time.

By default, metrics for each Service/API-fielded request cycle will be aggregated by a context determined partially by the request's HTTP method and by its response's status code. If you are monitoring a large infrastructure with hundreds of routes, grouping by HTTP method can be too granular or costly for performant /signalfx requests on a 1s interval, depending on the server resources. This context grouping can be disabled with the boolean configuration option aggregate_by_http_method.

curl -X POST -d "name=signalfx" -d "config.aggregate_by_http_method=false" http://localhost:8001/plugins
# or to edit an existing plugin
curl -X PATCH -d "config.aggregate_by_http_method=false" http://localhost:8001/plugins/<sfx_plugin_id>