cert-exporter

Kubernetes uses PKI certificates for authentication between all major components. These certs are critical for the operation of your cluster but are often opaque to an administrator. This application is designed to parse certificates and export expiration information for Prometheus to scrape.

WARNING If you run this application in your cluster it will probably require elevated privileges of some kind. Additionally you are exposing VERY sensitive information to it. Review the source!

Usage

cert-exporter can publish metrics about

• x509 certificates on disk encoded in the PEM format and PKCS12 format
• Certs embedded or referenced from kubeconfig files.
• Certs stored in Kubernetes
  • secrets
    • direct support for cert-manager
    • support for password-protected certificates
  • configmaps
  • admission webhooks
  • cert-manager [CertificateRequest] (https://cert-manager.io/docs/usage/certificaterequest/)
• Certs stored in AWS Secrets manager

See deployment for detailed information on running cert-exporter and examples of running it in a kops cluster.

See custom-secrets for examples of how to run cert-exporter to scrape certificates in secrets managed by you (not cert-manager).

To enable and scrape certificates from AWS secrets, do the following:

go run main.go --aws-account=<account_number> --aws-region=<region> --aws-secret=<secret_name_1> [--aws-secret=<secret_name_2>]

Of course, AWS credentials must be configured. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-go/v1/developer-guide/configuring-sdk.html

Helm

helm repo add cert-exporter https://joe-elliott.github.io/cert-exporter/
helm repo update
helm upgrade --install cert-exporter cert-exporter/cert-exporter

Dashboard

After running cert-exporter in your cluster it's easy to build a custom dashboard to expose information about the certs in your cluster.

Exported Metrics

cert-exporter exports the following metrics

# HELP cert_exporter_error_total Cert Exporter Errors
# TYPE cert_exporter_error_total counter
cert_exporter_error_total 0
# HELP cert_exporter_cert_expires_in_seconds Number of seconds til the cert expires.
# TYPE cert_exporter_cert_expires_in_seconds gauge
cert_exporter_cert_expires_in_seconds{filename="certsSibling/client.crt",issuer="root",nodename="master0"} 8.639964560021e+06
# HELP cert_exporter_kubeconfig_expires_in_seconds Number of seconds til the cert in kubeconfig expires.
# TYPE cert_exporter_kubeconfig_expires_in_seconds gauge
cert_exporter_kubeconfig_expires_in_seconds{filename="kubeConfigSibling/kubeconfig",name="cluster1",nodename="master0",type="cluster"} 8.639964559682e+06
cert_exporter_kubeconfig_expires_in_seconds{filename="kubeConfigSibling/kubeconfig",name="user1",nodename="master0",type="user"} 8.639964559249e+06
# HELP cert_exporter_secret_expires_in_seconds Number of seconds til the cert in the secret expires.
# TYPE cert_exporter_secret_expires_in_seconds gauge
cert_exporter_secret_expires_in_seconds{cn="example.com",issuer="example.com",key_name="ca.crt",secret_name="selfsigned-cert-tls",secret_namespace="cert-manager-test"} 8.6396867095666e+06
cert_exporter_secret_expires_in_seconds{cn="example.com",issuer="example.com",key_name="tls.crt",secret_name="selfsigned-cert-tls",secret_namespace="cert-manager-test"} 8.639686709417423e+06
# HELP certrequest_expires_in_seconds Number of seconds til the cert in the CertificateRequest expires.
# TYPE certrequest_expires_in_seconds gauge
cert_exporter_certrequest_expires_in_seconds{cert_request="example-crt-gn762",certrequest_namespace="cert-manager-test",cn="example.com",issuer="example.com"}
# HELP certrequest_not_after_timestamp Timestamp when the cert in the CertificateRequest expires.
# TYPE certrequest_not_after_timestamp gauge
cert_exporter_certrequest_not_after_timestamp{cert_request="example-crt-gn762",certrequest_namespace="cert-manager-test",cn="example.com",issuer="example.com"}
# HELP certrequest_not_before_timestamp Activation timestamp for cert in the certrequest.
# TYPE certrequest_not_before_timestamp gauge
cert_exporter_certrequest_not_before_timestamp{cert_request="example-crt-gn762",certrequest_namespace="cert-manager-test",cn="example.com",issuer="example.com"}

cert_exporter_error_total
The total number of unexpected errors encountered by cert-exporter. A good metric to watch to feel comfortable certs are being exported properly.

cert_exporter_cert_expires_in_seconds
The number of seconds until a certificate stored in the PEM format is expired. The filename, issuer, cn, and nodename label indicates the exported cert.

cert_exporter_kubeconfig_expires_in_seconds
The number of seconds until a certificate stored in a kubeconfig expires. The filename, type, name, and nodename labels indicate the kubeconfig, cluster or user node and name of the node. See details here.

cert_exporter_secret_expires_in_seconds The number of seconds until a certificate stored in a kubernetes secret expires. The key_name, issuer, cn, secret_name, and secret_namespace labels indicate the secret key, name and namespace.

cert_exporter_certrequest_expires_in_seconds The number of seconds until a certificate stored in a cert-manager CertificateRequest expires. The cert_request, issuer, cn, and certrequest_namespace labels indicate the CertificateRequest, comon name and namespace.

cert_exporter_certrequest_not_after_timestamp The timestamp when a certificate stored in a cert-manager CertificateRequest expires. The cert_request, issuer, cn, and certrequest_namespace labels indicate the CertificateRequest, comon name and namespace.

cert_exporter_certrequest_not_before_timestamp The timestamp when a certificate stored in a cert-manager CertificateRequest becomes valid. The cert_request, issuer, cn, and certrequest_namespace labels indicate the CertificateRequest, comon name and namespace.

Other Docs

• Testing
  • An overview of the testing scripts and how to run them. It requires kind CLI.
• Deployment
  • Information on how to deploy cert-exporter as well as examples for a kops cluster.
• Daemonset for Prometheus-operator
  • How to deploy daemonset+service+servicemonitor+dashboard if you use prometheus-operator into the monitoring namespace