Air Gapped Pixie

Follow these instructions to install Pixie in an air gapped environment. An air gapped environment is any environment that is not directly connected to the Internet.

• Review Pixie's requirements to make sure that your Kubernetes cluster is supported.

• Pixie interacts with the Linux kernel to install BPF programs to collect telemetry data. In order to install BPF programs, Pixie vizier-pem-* pods require privileged access.

1. Clone the Pixie repo.

git clone https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie.git
cd pixie

2. Install mkcert following the directions here. Pixie uses SSL to securely communicate between Pixie Cloud and the UI. Self-managed Pixie Cloud requires managing your own certificates. mkcert is a simple tool to create and install a local certificate authority (CA) in the system root store in order to generate locally-trusted certificates.

3. Start mkcert. This command will set up local CA and create a root certificate that Chrome and your CLI will now trust. To access Pixie Cloud from different machine that the one it was set up on, you will need to install this certificate there as well.

mkcert -install

4. Create the plc namespace. This namespace is not currently configurable. Several of the install scripts expect Pixie Cloud to be deployed to the plc namespace.

kubectl create namespace plc

5. (Optional) If you are using a custom domain, find and replace dev.withpixie.dev with your own domain in the ./scripts/create_cloud_secrets.sh file.

6. Create the Pixie Cloud secrets. From the top level pixie/ directory, run:

./scripts/create_cloud_secrets.sh

7. Collect and publish the required images to a private image registry. To list the images needed to deploy Pixie Cloud, run these commands:

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/pixie-dev-public/cloud/latest/pixie_cloud.tar.gz | tar xj
cd pixie_cloud
cat cloud_image_list.txt

8. Modify the yaml files in the pixie_cloud/yamls folder to pull the images from your private image registry.

9. Modify the pixie_cloud/yamls/cloud.yaml file to remove the plugin-db-updater-job job.

10. Deploy Pixie Cloud dependencies and wait for all pods within the plc namespace to become ready and available before proceeding to the next step. If there is an error, you may need to retry this step.

kubectl apply -f yamls/cloud_deps_elastic_operator.yaml
kubectl apply -f yamls/cloud_deps.yaml

11. (Optional) If you are using a custom domain, make the following two edits to the yamls/cloud.yaml file:

• Replace the dev.withpixie.dev value for PL_DOMAIN_NAME in the pl-domain-config ConfigMap with your own domain.
• Replace the - suffix: "dev.withpixie.dev" line in the proxy-envoy-config ConfigMap with -prefix: "*".

12. Deploy Pixie Cloud:

kubectl apply -f yamls/cloud.yaml

13. Wait for all pods within the plc namespace to become ready and available. Note that you may have one or more create-hydra-client-job pod errors, but as long as long as another instance of that pod successfully completes, that is ok.

kubectl get pods -n plc

Note about Step 10: if you applied the cloud.yaml manifest multiple times (for example, while resolving an ImagePullError), you will see the following create-admin-job and create-hydra-client-job errors:

create-admin-job time="2022-07-05T21:27:40Z" level=fatal msg="Org 'default' with domain 'default.com' already exists. Remove the org from the database or change the org name."

create-hydra-client-job {
create-hydra-client-job   "error": "Unable to insert or update resource because a resource with that value exists already"
create-hydra-client-job }

If you get these errors, delete the plc namespace and start over from Step 4 of the install guide.

1. Ensure that the cloud-proxy-service and vzconn-service LoadBalancer services have External IPs assigned. If you are running Pixie Cloud on minikube, you likely need to run minikube tunnel before continuing with this setup.

# If using minikube, run:
minikube tunnel
# Check if external IPs have been assigned
kubectl get service cloud-proxy-service -n plc
kubectl get service vzconn-service -n plc

2. Setup your DNS. This produces a dev_dns_updater binary in the top level pixie directory.

go build src/utils/dev_dns_updater/dev_dns_updater.go

3. You'll need to hardcode in your kube config. Leave this tab open.

./dev_dns_updater --domain-name="dev.withpixie.dev"  --kubeconfig=$HOME/.kube/config --n=plc

4. Navigate to dev.withpixie.dev in your browser. Make sure that the network you are on can access your cluster.

Self-managed Pixie Cloud only supports one organization.

1. To setup the default admin account, check the logs for the create-admin-job pod by running:

kubectl logs create-admin-job-<pod_string> -n plc

2. Open the URL from the pod's logs to set the password for the admin@default.com user.

3. Once the password has been set, login using admin@default.com for the identifier and your new password.

After logging into the Pixie UI using the admin account, you will see a blank UI with the following errors in the DevTools console:

To resolve these errors, you'll need to set up the script dev environment:

git clone https://github.com/pixie-io/pixie.git
cd pixie/src/pxl_scripts
make dev

Open Chrome’s DevTools console and run the following:

localStorage.setItem('px-custom-oss-bundle-path', 'http://127.0.0.1:8000/bundle-oss.json')
localStorage.setItem('px-custom-core-bundle-path', 'http://127.0.0.1:8000/bundle-oss.json')

Once you have set these variables, do a soft reload of the UI webpage (a hard reload will clear the variable you just set).

Once you're able to see Pixie's UI, you'll need to use Pixie's UI to create a deploy key. Record this value somewhere, we'll use it in a future step.

Add users to your organization to share access to Pixie Live Views, query running clusters, and deploy new Pixie clusters. For instructions, see the User Management & Sharing reference docs.

1. Download the vizier artifacts:

curl https://storage.googleapis.com/pixie-dev-public/vizier/latest/vizier_yamls.tar | tar x
cd yamls

2. Update the deploy-key and PX_CLUSTER_NAME values in the vizier/secrets.yaml file. Remember that you previously created the deploy key in this step.

3. Deploy the vizier/secrets.yaml file.

kubectl apply -f vizier/secrets.yaml

5. Determine whether you'd like to deploy Pixie with or without etcd. We recommend installing Pixie without etcd as long as your cluster supports Pixie creating and using PVs.

To deploy Pixie without etcd, use the following yamls:

• vizier/vizier_metadata_persist_prod.yaml
• vizier_deps/nats_prod.yaml

To deploy Pixie with etcd, use the following yamls:

• vizier/vizier_etcd_metadata_prod.yaml
• vizier_deps/etcd_prod.yaml

6. Collect and publish the required Pixie Vizier images to a private registry. Note: the below commands assume you are deploying Pixie without etcd.

To list the images needed to deploy Pixie Cloud:

cat images/vizier_image_list.txt

7. Modify the yaml files you selected in Step 5 to pull the images from your private image registry.

8. Apply the yamls. Note: the below commands assume you are deploying Pixie without etcd.

kubectl apply -f vizier_deps/nats_prod.yaml
kubectl apply -f vizier/vizier_metadata_persist_prod.yaml

9. Wait for the pods in the pl namespace to become ready and available:

kubectl get pods -n pl

You may see a warning in the Pixie UI that is similar to the following:

You can ignore this warning. Pixie air gap install uses the non-operator version of Pixie. The default install of Pixie recently switched to use an operator, which will allow us to add self-healing features in the future. This warning was to encourage users to upgrade to the operator version of Pixie, which is not currently available for air gap users.

For more deploy options that you can specify to configure Pixie, refer to our deploy options.

Check out the next section of our docs for Using Pixie. You can also check out our Tutorials section.

Learn how to use Pixie for

• Network Monitoring
• Infra Health
• Service Performance
• Database Query Profiling
• Request Tracing
• Kafka Monitoring

There are two options for deploying Pixie to another Kubernetes cluster.

This will spin up a separate instance of Pixie Cloud for each Pixie deployment that you have.

If you select this option, each of your Pixie deployments will point to the same instance of Pixie Cloud. In order to ensure that all of your clusters can access Pixie Cloud, you will need to do the following:

• Rename your Pixie Cloud address from dev.withpixie.dev to something specific to your environment.
• Set up DNS rules for your new Pixie Cloud address. The specifics of this will depend on your environment.
• Ensure your cloud TLS certificates are for your new Pixie Cloud domain.
• Ping the new Pixie Cloud address from the new cluster before deploying Pixie to make sure traffic is successfully reaching Pixie Cloud.

Please see our Troubleshooting guide, reach out on our Community Slack or file an issue on GitHub.

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