Komodor annotations enable users to create static and dynamic hyperlinks to other solutions and resources.

For example, you can use Annotations to provide hyperlinks to the following:

• Source Control like Git
• DevOps tools
• Monitoring and observability
• Integrated solutions

Where does Komodor utilize annotations?

Komodor uses these annotations to enrich service information and create powerful connections between services.

• Services explorer
• Related services
• Events screen
• Matching alerts to the correct services

There are annotations you can declare in a Deployment manifest that will populate specific dashboards within Komodor.

Deploy Links	Service Links

The Yaml Path is metadata.annotations

metadata:
  annotations:
    app.komodor.com/deploy.link.cloudecho: 'https://github.com/cloudecho/hello-world-go'
    app.komodor.com/service.link.cloudecho: 'https://github.com/cloudecho/hello-world-go'

Komodor Annotations provide links from the Troubleshooting components for Deployments and Services

• The Deployment Details of a Deployment Event
• The Info tab of the Service

Komodor annotations should be placed in the deployment resource annotations (annotations set on the pod template are ignored)

Annotation Links

Annotation links have different types:

• Deploy
• Job
• Service

Deploy

For each deployment version, you can add a quick link with the relevant filters already in place!

Example

app.komodor.com/deploy.link.name:url

Job

app.komodor.com/job.link.name:url Example:

Service

Customing Links

You can create custom links to external and internal applications by crafting your own URL to the application using a skeleton URL and placeholders provided by Komodor. Just copy the URL of the application you want to link to, identify the placeholders in the URL that are used to query the application, and replace them with placeholders for your use. Please find the below examples as references for common applications.

Custom Format

app.komodor.com/[deploy|service].link.name:value

Examples:

The following values can be used to enrich the URL: 

*Not applicable in the Service context. **Custom links with a failed pod name will be created on health events only. *** Dates can be crafted using the display guidelines of date-fns https://date-fns.org/v2.25.0/docs/format

Example of how to use YAML full path:

spec:
  replicas: 5
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: nginx
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: test
      image: nginx:1.14.2
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
      - name: test2
        image: nginx:1.14.2
        ports:
        - containerPort: 80
    metadata:
      labels:
        app.kubernetes.io/name: nginx
        app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: helm 

Full example

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: annotation-example
  annotations:
    app.komodor.com/service.link.grafana-overall-system-health: "https://grafana.com/service/annotation-example"
    app.komodor.com/service.link.datadog: "https://datadog.com/dashboard/annotation-example"
    app.komodor.com/service.link.playbook: "https://docs.google.com/playbook"
    app.komodor.com/deploy.job.jenkins: "https://ci.jenkins-ci.org/computer/job"
    app.komodor.com/deploy.link.logs: "https://app.logz.io/#/dashboard/kibana/discover?_a=env:1.0.1"
    app.komodor.com/deploy.link.sentry: "https://sentry.io/organizations/rookoutz/issues/?project=1320440&query=sdk.version%3A1.0.1&statsPeriod=14d"
    app.komodor.com/service.link.datadog: "https://app.datadoghq.com/apm/traces?query=service%3A${service}%20kube_namespace%3A${namespace}%20env%3A${cluster}&cols=core_service%2Ccore_resource_name%2Clog_duration%2Clog_http.method%2Clog_http.status_code&historicalData=true&messageDisplay=inline&sort=desc&streamTraces=true&start=${epochStart}&end=${epochEnd}&paused=true"
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      run: example
  replicas: 1
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        run: example
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: hello-world
          image: gcr.io/google-samples/node-hello:1.0.1
          ports:
            - containerPort: 8080
              protocol: TCP

Annotations Best Practices

At Komodor we believe that k8s annotations are the best method for describing services metadata. This includes all the “extra” fields used to tag and label your services, both for other team members and for external tools. BTW, We collect data from both annotations and labels.

Official Kubernetes recommendations

app.kubernetes.io/component: database
app.kubernetes.io/part-of: wordpress
app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: helm

Komodor recommendations

app.komodor.com/label.team: backend
app.komodor.com/label.group: infrastructure
app.komodor.com/label.owners: "infa-team"
app.komodor.com/label.alert-team: "devs"
app.komodor.com/label.Impacted-by: redis

Usage example

• Tagging Team annotations on relevant services and adding relevant metadata on the alert metadata in Datadog.
• Use the Team name in the alert tools (for example PagerDuty) as part of the Komodor labels.