Installing Kubewatch on IBM Cloud

Abhishek Dingar

3 min readFeb 18, 2021

This document will describe how to install Kubewatch on IBM Cloud using Kubernetes services.

Step 1 — Provision Kubernetes Cluster

Click the Catalog button on the top
Select Service from the Catalog
Search for Kubernetes Service and click on it

You are now at the Kubernetes deployment page. You need to specify some information about the cluster.
Choose either of the following plans; standard or free. The free plan only has one worker node and no subnet. To provision a standard cluster. You will need to upgrade your account to Pay-As-You-Go
To upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go account, complete the following steps:
In the console, go to Manage > Account.
Select Account settings and click Add credit card.
Enter your payment information, click Next, and submit your information
Choose classic or VPC , read the docs and choose the most suitable type for yourself

Now choose your location settings,
Choose Geography (continent)

Choose Single or Multizone.

In single zone, your data is only kept on the datacenter while on the other hand with Multizone, it is distributed to multiple zones, thus safer in an unforeseen zone failure
If you wish to use Multizone, please set up your account with VRF

If at your current location selection, there is no available Virtual LAN, a new VLAN will be created for you
Choose a Worker node setup or use the preselected one. Set Worker node amount per zone
Choose Master Service Endpoint.

In VRF-enabled accounts, you can choose private-only to make your master accessible on the private network or via VPN tunnel. Choose public-only to make your master publicly accessible. When you have a VRF-enabled account, your cluster is set up by default to use both private and public endpoints.

Give desired tags to your cluster, click create
Wait for your cluster to be provisioned
Your cluster is ready for usage

Step 2 — Deploy IBM Cloud Block Storage plug-in

The Block Storage plug-in is a persistent, high-performance iSCSI storage that you can add to your apps by using Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs).

Click the Catalog button on the top
Select Software from the catalog
Search for IBM Cloud Block Storage plug-in and click on it
On the application page, click on the dot next to the cluster you wish to use
Click on Enter or Select Namespace and choose the default Namespace or use a custom one (if you get an error please wait 30 minutes for the cluster to finalize)
Give a name to this workspace
Click install and wait for the deployment

Step 3 — Installing Kubewatch on IBM Cloud

Requirements:

A running Kubernetes cluster on which you need to have cluster-admin privileges
A Slack account

Steps:

Configure Slack- You will need to create a Slack bot and invite the bot to the Slack channel in which you want Kubewatch to post all the notifications. Kubewatch uses webhooks to display notifications
Create a private channel and invite the bot in your channel by typing /invite @name_of_your_bot in the Slack message area.
Create a Kubewatch config map with the Slack token and the channel name. You can also modify the flags to configure Kubewatch to notify on changes to particular types of Kubernetes resources. The below configuration only monitors pods and services
Create a service account for Kubewatch to interact with the Kubernetes resources and assign the relevant privileges through a ClusterRole and a ClusterRoleBinding
Create a Kubewatch deployment
Check if the pod is running
view the Kubewatch container logs
Check the Slack channel for notifications
Kubewatch will now monitor the cluster and send data to the Slack channel

The installation is done. Enjoy!