Get Guaranteed Outcomes for Mirantis Kubernetes Engine with OpsCare Support

At Mirantis, we are proud to back our cutting-edge product innovation with world-class customer support. To make this possible, we integrate valuable customer support tools directly within the products themselves. This enables us to offer guaranteed outcomes for our premium support offerings, such as up to 99.99% availability SLA for managed services.

This is all part of our larger strategy of delivering DevOps-as-a-service, which combines CI/CD based lifecycle management and the automated monitoring and alerting capabilities of Mirantis products with the proactive change management systems and processes of Mirantis’ global 24x7 support team.

Critical alerts for superior response time

Continuous monitoring and automated alerting already exist in Mirantis Container Cloud and Mirantis OpenStack for Kubernetes through the StackLight toolchain. Now we’ve also added such capabilities to Mirantis Kubernetes Engine (MKE) 3.5, including components such as Alertmanager. These components enable us to extend our OpsCare 24x7x365 proactive support to MKE customers.

Specifically, we added the ability to send critical alerts and notifications to Mirantis’ incident management system, which is based on Salesforce. These alerts are automatically routed to support engineers, who can then proactively contact the customer or remediate the situation directly.

It’s important to note that for OpsCare, MKE doesn’t send specific customer data to Mirantis, only indications of critical severity issues so that Mirantis support can offer a superior response time and peace of mind for the customer. MKE specifically monitors for the most common causes of service outages that Mirantis has observed in the field, such as the MKE API being fully unavailable, the MKE Node being completely offline, etc. The OpsCare monitoring and alerting is in no way related to product telemetry.

Configuring and enabling OpsCare

OpsCare support in Mirantis Kubernetes Engine must be manually enabled. Follow the instructions below to enable and configure the OpsCare settings.

OpsCare support in Mirantis Kubernetes Engine is enabled via the Command Line Interface (CLI) or Graphical User Interface (GUI). The customer must obtain a set of Salesforce credentials with help from their Mirantis Customer Success Manager. Usually, the credentials consist of the following: (Note:, The acronym “sfdc” stands for Salesforce Dot Com.)

sfdc_username
sfdc_password
sfdc_environment_id

Every customer has a unique set of sfdc_username, sfdc_password and sfdc_environment_id credentials, and they are usually stored as environment variables on the hosts. However, for MKE, we prefer a more secure way, namely Docker Swarm secrets, to store this sensitive information.

Before enabling OpsCare support in Mirantis Kubernetes Engine, you must create three secrets with the above names.

To create the secrets via the GUI, navigate to Admin Settings as seen below.

To create them via CLI, run the following docker commands on the Docker Swarm manager:

printf "username-obtained-from-csm" | docker secret create sfdc_username -
printf "password-obtained-from-csm" | docker secret create sfdc_password -
printf "environment-id-obtained-from-csm" | docker secret create sfdc_environment_id -

After you create the secrets, you can enable OpsCare support in Mirantis Kubernetes Engine via the GUI. Alternatively, you can accomplish this via CLI by downloading, updating and uploading the MKE Config as follows:

MKE_USERNAME=admin
MKE_PASSWORD=
MKE_HOST=

AUTHTOKEN=$(curl --silent --insecure --data "{\username\":\"$MKE_USERNAME\"