Metrics Analysis

As part of the analysis process, Flagger can validate service level objectives (SLOs) like availability, error rate percentage, average response time and any other objective based on app specific metrics. If a drop in performance is noticed during the SLOs analysis, the release will be automatically rolled back with minimum impact to end-users.
Builtin metrics
Flagger comes with two builtin metric checks: HTTP request success rate and duration.
  analysis:
    metrics:
    - name: request-success-rate
      interval: 1m
      # minimum req success rate (non 5xx responses)
      # percentage (0-100)
      thresholdRange:
        min: 99
    - name: request-duration
      interval: 1m
      # maximum req duration P99
      # milliseconds
      thresholdRange:
        max: 500
For each metric you can specify a range of accepted values with thresholdRange and the window size or the time series with interval. The builtin checks are available for every service mesh / ingress controller and are implemented with Prometheus queries.
Custom metrics
The canary analysis can be extended with custom metric checks. Using a MetricTemplate custom resource, you configure Flagger to connect to a metric provider and run a query that returns a float64 value. The query result is used to validate the canary based on the specified threshold range.
apiVersion: flagger.app/v1beta1
kind: MetricTemplate
metadata:
  name: my-metric
spec:
  provider:
    type: # can be prometheus or datadog
    address: # API URL
    secretRef:
      name: # name of the secret containing the API credentials
  query: # metric query
The following variables are available in query templates:
name (canary.metadata.name)
namespace (canary.metadata.namespace)
target (canary.spec.targetRef.name)
service (canary.spec.service.name)
ingress (canary.spec.ingresRef.name)
interval (canary.spec.analysis.metrics[].interval)
A canary analysis metric can reference a template with templateRef:
  analysis:
    metrics:
      - name: "my metric"
        templateRef:
          name: my-metric
          # namespace is optional
          # when not specified, the canary namespace will be used
          namespace: flagger
        # accepted values
        thresholdRange:
          min: 10
          max: 1000
        # metric query time window
        interval: 1m
Prometheus
You can create custom metric checks targeting a Prometheus server by setting the provider type to prometheus and writing the query in PromQL.
Prometheus template example:
apiVersion: flagger.app/v1beta1
kind: MetricTemplate
metadata:
  name: not-found-percentage
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  provider:
    type: prometheus
    address: http://prometheus.istio-system:9090
  query: |
    100 - sum(
        rate(
            istio_requests_total{
              reporter="destination",
              destination_workload_namespace="{{ namespace }}",
              destination_workload="{{ target }}",
              response_code!="404"
            }[{{ interval }}]
        )
    )
    /
    sum(
        rate(
            istio_requests_total{
              reporter="destination",
              destination_workload_namespace="{{ namespace }}",
              destination_workload="{{ target }}"
            }[{{ interval }}]
        )
    ) * 100
Reference the template in the canary analysis:
  analysis:
    metrics:
      - name: "404s percentage"
        templateRef:
          name: not-found-percentage
          namespace: istio-system
        thresholdRange:
          max: 5
        interval: 1m
The above configuration validates the canary by checking if the HTTP 404 req/sec percentage is below 5 percent of the total traffic. If the 404s rate reaches the 5% threshold, then the canary fails.
Prometheus gRPC error rate example:
apiVersion: flagger.app/v1beta1
kind: MetricTemplate
metadata:
  name: grpc-error-rate-percentage
  namespace: flagger
spec:
  provider:
    type: prometheus
    address: http://flagger-prometheus.flagger-system:9090
  query: |
    100 - sum(
        rate(
            grpc_server_handled_total{
              grpc_code!="OK",
              kubernetes_namespace="{{ namespace }}",
              kubernetes_pod_name=~"{{ target }}-[0-9a-zA-Z]+(-[0-9a-zA-Z]+)"
            }[{{ interval }}]
        )
    )
    /
    sum(
        rate(
            grpc_server_started_total{
              kubernetes_namespace="{{ namespace }}",
              kubernetes_pod_name=~"{{ target }}-[0-9a-zA-Z]+(-[0-9a-zA-Z]+)"
            }[{{ interval }}]
        )
    ) * 100
The above template is for gRPC services instrumented with go-grpc-prometheus.
Datadog
You can create custom metric checks using the Datadog provider.
Create a secret with your Datadog API credentials:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: datadog
  namespace: istio-system
data:
  datadog_api_key: your-datadog-api-key
  datadog_application_key: your-datadog-application-key
Datadog template example:
apiVersion: flagger.app/v1beta1
kind: MetricTemplate
metadata:
  name: not-found-percentage
  namespace: istio-system
spec:
  provider:
    type: datadog
    address: https://api.datadoghq.com
    secretRef:
      name: datadog
  query: |
    100 - (
      sum:istio.mesh.request.count{
        reporter:destination,
        destination_workload_namespace:{{ namespace }},
        destination_workload:{{ target }},
        !response_code:404
      }.as_count()
      / 
      sum:istio.mesh.request.count{
        reporter:destination,
        destination_workload_namespace:{{ namespace }},
        destination_workload:{{ target }}
      }.as_count()
    ) * 100
Reference the template in the canary analysis:
  analysis:
    metrics:
      - name: "404s percentage"
        templateRef:
          name: not-found-percentage
          namespace: istio-system
        thresholdRange:
          max: 5
        interval: 1m
Amazon CloudWatch
You can create custom metric checks using the CloudWatch metrics provider.
CloudWatch template example:
apiVersion: flagger.app/v1alpha1
kind: MetricTemplate
metadata:
  name: cloudwatch-error-rate
spec:
  provider:
    type: cloudwatch
    region: ap-northeast-1 # specify the region of your metrics
  query: |
    [
        {
            "Id": "e1",
            "Expression": "m1 / m2",
            "Label": "ErrorRate"
        },
        {
            "Id": "m1",
            "MetricStat": {
                "Metric": {
                    "Namespace": "MyKubernetesCluster",
                    "MetricName": "ErrorCount",
                    "Dimensions": [
                        {
                            "Name": "appName",
                            "Value": "{{ name }}.{{ namespace }}"
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "Period": 60,
                "Stat": "Sum",
                "Unit": "Count"
            },
            "ReturnData": false
        },
        {
            "Id": "m2",
            "MetricStat": {
                "Metric": {
                    "Namespace": "MyKubernetesCluster",
                    "MetricName": "RequestCount",
                    "Dimensions": [
                        {
                            "Name": "appName",
                            "Value": "{{ name }}.{{ namespace }}"
                        }
                    ]
                },
                "Period": 60,
                "Stat": "Sum",
                "Unit": "Count"
            },
            "ReturnData": false
        }
    ]
The query format documentation can be found here.
Reference the template in the canary analysis:
  analysis:
    metrics:
      - name: "app error rate"
        templateRef:
          name: cloudwatch-error-rate
        thresholdRange:
          max: 0.1
        interval: 1m
Note that Flagger need AWS IAM permission to perform cloudwatch:GetMetricData to use this provider.
New Relic
You can create custom metric checks using the New Relic provider.
Create a secret with your New Relic Insights credentials:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: newrelic
  namespace: istio-system
data:
  newrelic_account_id: your-account-id
  newrelic_query_key: your-insights-query-key
New Relic template example:
apiVersion: flagger.app/v1beta1
kind: MetricTemplate
metadata:
  name: newrelic-error-rate
  namespace: ingress-nginx
spec:
  provider:
    type: newrelic
    secretRef:
      name: newrelic
  query: |
    SELECT 
        filter(sum(nginx_ingress_controller_requests), WHERE status >= '500') / 
        sum(nginx_ingress_controller_requests) * 100
    FROM Metric 
    WHERE metricName = 'nginx_ingress_controller_requests' 
    AND ingress = '{{ ingress }}' AND  namespace = '{{ namespace }}'
Reference the template in the canary analysis:
  analysis:
    metrics:
      - name: "error rate"
        templateRef:
          name: newrelic-error-rate
          namespace: ingress-nginx
        thresholdRange:
          max: 5
        interval: 1m
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