Metrics

The External Secrets Operator exposes its Prometheus metrics in the /metrics path. To enable it, set the serviceMonitor.enabled Helm flag to true. In addition you can also set webhook.serviceMonitor.enabled=true and certController.serviceMonitor.enabled=true to create ServiceMonitor resources for the other components.

If you are using a different monitoring tool that also needs a /metrics endpoint, you can set the metrics.service.enabled Helm flag to true. In addition you can also set webhook.metrics.service.enabled and certController.metrics.service.enabled to scrape the other components.

The Operator has the metrics inherited from Kubebuilder plus some custom metrics with the externalsecret prefix.

External Secret Metrics

Name	Type	Description
externalsecret_provider_api_calls_count	Counter	Number of API calls made to an upstream secret provider API. The metric provides a provider, call and status labels.
externalsecret_sync_calls_total	Counter	Total number of the External Secret sync calls
externalsecret_sync_calls_error	Counter	Total number of the External Secret sync errors
externalsecret_status_condition	Gauge	The status condition of a specific External Secret
externalsecret_reconcile_duration	Gauge	The duration time to reconcile the External Secret
controller_runtime_reconcile_total	Counter	Holds the totalnumber of reconciliations per controller. It has two labels. controller label refers to the controller name and result label refers to the reconcile result i.e success, error, requeue, requeue_after.
controller_runtime_reconcile_errors_total	Counter	Total number of reconcile errors per controller
controller_runtime_reconcile_time_seconds	Histogram	Length of time per reconcile per controller
controller_runtime_reconcile_queue_length	Gauge	Length of reconcile queue per controller
controller_runtime_max_concurrent_reconciles	Gauge	Maximum number of concurrent reconciles per controller
controller_runtime_active_workers	Gauge	Number of currently used workers per controller

Dashboard

We provide a Grafana Dashboard that gives you an overview of External Secrets Operator:

Service Level Indicators and Alerts

We find the following Service Level Indicators (SLIs) useful when operating ESO. They should give you a good starting point and hints to develop your own Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

Webhook HTTP Status Codes

The webhook HTTP status code indicates that a HTTP Request was answered successfully or not. If the Webhook pod is not able to serve the requests properly then that failure may cascade down to the controller or any other user of kube-apiserver.

SLI Example: request error percentage.

sum(increase(controller_runtime_webhook_requests_total{service=~"external-secrets.*",code="500"}[1m]))
/
sum(increase(controller_runtime_webhook_requests_total{service=~"external-secrets.*"}[1m]))

Webhook HTTP Request Latency

If the webhook server is not able to respond in time then that may cause a timeout at the client. This failure may cascade down to the controller or any other user of kube-apiserver.

SLI Example: p99 across all webhook requests.

histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum(rate(controller_runtime_webhook_latency_seconds_bucket{service=~"external-secrets.*"}[5m])) by (le)
)

Controller Workqueue Depth

If the workqueue depth is > 0 for a longer period of time then this is an indicator for the controller not being able to reconcile resources in time. I.e. delivery of secret updates is delayed.

Note: when a controller is restarted, then queue length = total number of resources. Make sure to measure the time it takes for the controller to fully reconcile all secrets after a restart. In large clusters this may take a while, make sure to define an acceptable timeframe to fully reconcile all resources.

sum(
  workqueue_depth{service=~"external-secrets.*"}
) by (name)

Controller Reconcile Latency

The controller should be able to reconcile resources within a reasonable timeframe. When latency is high secret delivery may impacted.

SLI Example: p99 across all controllers.

histogram_quantile(0.99,
  sum(rate(controller_runtime_reconcile_time_seconds_bucket{service=~"external-secrets.*"}[5m])) by (le)
)

Controller Reconcile Error

The controller should be able to reconcile resources without errors. When errors occurr secret delivery may be impacted which could cascade down to the secret consuming applications.

sum(increase(
  controller_runtime_reconcile_total{service=~"external-secrets.*",controller=~"$controller"}[1m])
) by (result)