Deploying PCF Metrics Tile

I wanted to share my experiences with deploying the PCF Metrics tile.  I have been working with this tile for about a month and have had great feedback from the consumers of this service.  The release of this tile as of writing this post is version 1.0.5.

Pivotal has the install procedure for deploying the tile located here.  If you are familiar with deploying tiles in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, this tile deployment is very easy.  Really, you just need to pick the network you are deploying on, the availability zone configuration, and import the called out stemcell for your infrastructure.  After configuring those settings, you will just need to Apply Changes to start the install of the tile.

Once the install has finished, you will now have a new space called "metrics" under the "system" org.  Inside of this space, you will have two apps running called metrics and metrics-api.  Both apps share the same route, but on two different paths.  It will look like the following:

• metrics = https://metrics.(foundation system domain)
• metrics-api = https://metrics.(foundation system domain)/v2

You will access the site from the metrics URL.  The minimum access an account needs is the SpaceAuditor role to be able to view application metrics.  The Pivotal documentation on using the Metrics tile is located here.

Troubleshooting Tips

Here are some tips if you run into issues with this tile.

Upgrading the tile - When going to upgrade the tile from an earlier version to a later version, the upgrade option does not work in Ops Manager (Tried 1.0.3 to 1.0.5 and 1.0.4 to 1.0.5) To get around this finding, I have had to delete the tile from the deployment and install clean.  Hopefully this will be fixed in a future release.

Removing the tile and clean up - After removing the tile from the deployment, the metrics space inside of the system org is still there.  The two metrics apps are there as well.  To start clean, make sure to remove the metrics space before you deploy a new version of the tile. 

Fixing the routes - I have noticed after performing an Apply Changes in Ops Manager that sometimes the routes for the metrics apps gets changed.  When checking the routes on the space, both the metrics and metrics-api apps are mapped to the route: https://metrics.(foundation system domain)/v2.  When this happens, the users are unable to access the metrics URL to login to the tile.  To fix this issue, run the following commands after logging into your foundation with the CF CLI.

1. cf target -o system -s metrics
2. cf delete-route (foundation system domain) -n metrics --path v2 -f
3. cf delete-route (foundation system domain) -n metrics -f
4. cf map-route metrics (foundation system domain) -n metrics
5. cf map-route metrics-api (foundation system domain) -n metrics --path v2
6. cf lo

These commands will remove the old routes and map the routes correctly to each metrics app.  These commands can easily be put into a script and ran anytime.  After updating the routes, you will not need to restage the two metrics apps.

Hopefully, you will try out this tile offering from PCF.  I am interested in seeing where they go from here.

~RRRII