Upgrade Responder

Overview

Upgrade Responder provides a way to notify the applications running remotely when there is a new version of the application become available. It will also keep a record of how many requests have been sent to the Upgrade Responder server during a certain period of time(e.g. one hour), to estimate how many instances of applications are running during that period.

Upgrade Responder server doesn't store any information that can be potentially used to identify the client that makes the request, including IP address. See here for a full list of data that will be stored.

For example, Longhorn uses Upgrade Responder project to create the public metric dashboard at https://metrics.longhorn.io/

How it works

1. Upgrade Responder server is set up at an application-specified endpoint.
2. A response JSON file (e.g. upgrade-response.json) is provided to the server as the response to the incoming request.
   1. In Kubernetes deployment, the response JSON is normally configured as a Config Map and can be easily swapped out when a new version is available.
3. The application now can make HTTP requests in a certain format to the application-specified endpoint periodically, and get the information about the latest available version.
   1. Server will expect each instance of the application makes a request once per hour.
4. Once the server received a request, it will:
   1. Check where the request is coming from.
   2. Remove the IP from the request.
   3. Store the information into an InfluxDB table.

What data will be stored

• Application Version
• Country and City of the request originated from
• (Optional) Application specified information that's can be helpful to identify the upgradability, e.g. Kubernetes version that application is running on.

Prerequisite

1. InfluxDB <= 1.8.x is running. We currently only support InfluxDB version <= 1.8.x.
2. Grafana v7.x is running

Usage

1. Running Upgrade Responder server

Start Upgrade Responder server by the command:

./bin/upgrade-responder --debug start <FLAGS>

The available flags are:

Flag	Example value	Description
--upgrade-response-config	/etc/upgrade-responder/upgrade-response.json	Specify the response configuration file for upgrade query. The Upgrade Responder server uses this file to determine the latest version of the application. See upgrade-response.json for an example of a configuration file
--application-name	awesome_app	Specify the name of the application that is using this Upgrade Responder server. This will be used to create a database named <application-name>_upgrade_responder in the InfluxDB to store all data for this Upgrade Responder
--influxdb-url	http://localhost:8086	Specify the URL of InfluxDB. Note that we currently only support InfluxDB version 1.8 and before
--influxdb-user	admin	Specify the InfluxDB username
--influxdb-pass	password	Specify the InfluxDB password
--query-period	1h	Specify the period for how often each instance of the application makes the request. Cannot change after set for the first time See here for more details
--geodb	/etc/upgrade-responder/GeoLite2-City.mmdb	Specify the path of to GeoDB file. See Geography database for more details about GeoDB
--port	8314	Specify the port number. By default port 8314 is used

If you are deploying Upgrade Responder Server in Kubernetes, you can use our provided chart.

Note: For now, the Upgrade Responder server needs to sit behind a LoadBalancer or a proxy to get the client's IP from the field X-Forwarded-For and extract the location from the IP. If you are deploying the Upgrade Responder server in Kubernetes, you can create an ingress to the xxx-upgrade-responder service so that Upgrade Responder server is behind a LoadBalancer. Then send the request to the ingress's domain.

As a quick way to check Upgrade Responder server is up and running, make a request to it:

curl -X POST http://<SERVER-IP>:8314/v1/checkupgrade \
     -d '{ "appVersion": "v0.8.1", "extraInfo": {}}' 

If the server is running correctly, you should receive a response contains the application's latest version stored in upgrade-response.json:

{"versions":[{"Name":"v1.0.0","ReleaseDate":"2020-05-30T10:20:00Z","Tags":["latest"]}],"requestIntervalInMinutes":60}

The InfluxDB should contain a new record:

:~$ influx
> USE <application-name>_upgrade_responder
> SELECT * FROM upgrade_request
name: upgrade_request
time                app_version city     country       country_isocode  x_request_id
----                ----------- ----     -------       ---------------  ------------
1620949031026036556 v0.8.1      San Jose United States US               ebbb83a-a224-49f9-aa73-8563d1da89b7

2. Creating Grafana dashboard

Assume that you already have a running Grafana instance. Use the following steps to create a Grafana dashboard to display statical graphs:

1. Install the Worldmap Panel plugin to your Grafana instance by following the instruction at here
2. Setup a DataSource in your Grafana instance to point to <application-name>_upgrade_responder database in the InfluxDb
3. Import this Grafana dashboard template. While in the importing form, change the DataSource to point to the DataSource in step 2 above and change the AppName to be the name of your application.
4. If you specify -query-period to be different than 1h, you need to change the time in GROUP BY clause in Grafana dashboard queries to be multiple of -query-period value

Upon success, you should see a dashboard similar to:

3. Modifying your application

Modify your application to periodically send the request to Upgrade Responder server every requestIntervalInMinutes where requestIntervalInMinutes is the value returned from Upgrade Responder sever when your application makes an upgrade request to it. Your application should send one POST request every requestIntervalInMinutes. The request's body should be in the format:

{
 "appVersion": "v0.8.1",
 "extraInfo": {
     "fieldKey": "value"
 }
}

By default, Upgrade Responder only groups data by appVersion field and creates Grafana panel for appVersion field. If you add extra fields and want to display statical information for those fields, there are extra steps you need to follow to setup InfluxDB and Grafana. See Add kubernetesVersion extra field for an example of how to add an extra field.

Go client

If your application is written in Golang, you can import our provided client package and use it to save time writing code. See our example for how to use the client package.

References

Response JSON config example

{
	"Versions": [{
		"Name": "v1.0.0",
		"ReleaseDate": "2020-05-30T10:20:00Z",
		"Tags": ["latest"]
	}]
}

Add kubernetesVersion extra field

For example, if you want to keep track of the number of your application instances by each Kubernetes version, you may want to include Kubernetes version into extraInfo in the request's body sent to Upgrade Responder server. The request's body may look like this:

{
    "appVersion": "v0.8.1",
    "extraInfo": {
        "kubernetesVersion": "v1.19.1"
    }
}

In order to display statical information about Kubernetes version on Grafana dashboard, you need to do:

1. Create a continuous query in the InfluxDB to periodically group data by Kubernetes version

   CREATE CONTINUOUS QUERY "cq_by_kubernetes_version_down_sampling" ON "<application-name>_upgrade_responder" BEGIN SELECT count("value") as total INTO "by_kubernetes_version_down_sampling" FROM "upgrade_request" GROUP BY time(1h),"kubernetes_version" END
   

   where:

   • cq_by_kubernetes_version_down_sampling is the name of the new continuous query (chosen by you)
   • <application-name>_upgrade_responder is the name of the database prefixed by your application's name
   • by_kubernetes_version_down_sampling is the name of the new measurement (chosen by you)
   • upgrade_request is the original measurement where Upgrade Responder server records data to
   • 1h is the query period. Make sure that this value is the same as --query-period
   • kubernetes_version is the tag to grouping data. This is derived from the camelcase form of kubernetesVersion to its snakecase form.

2. Create a Grafana panel that pull data from the new measurement by_kubernetes_version_down_sampling similar to this:

The flag --query-period

This value should match the frequency that your application send requests to the Upgrade Responder server. This value should also match time in GROUP BY clause in Grafana queries.

For example, if your application is sending one request to the Upgrade Responder server two hours. This value should be set to 2h. You also need to set 2h for the time in GROUP BY clause in Grafana queries.

By default, the --query-period is set to 1h. Your application will need to send request to Upgrade Responder server every hour.

Normally, --query-period should be decided at the beginning and should not be changed after. Changing the value may cause temporary data mismatch in InfluxDB. If you need to change --query-period, please follow the steps:

1. Manually drop all continuous queries in <application-name>_upgrade_responder

   influx -username <your-username> -password <your-password>
   > SHOW CONTINUOUS QUERIES
   # all continuous queries in the database <application-name>_upgrade_responder are displayed
   > DROP CONTINUOUS QUERY <continuous-query-name> ON <application-name>_upgrade_responder

2. Restart Upgrade Responder server with new value for --query-period
3. Change the time in GROUP BY clause in Grafana dashboard queries to match --query-period
4. Modify your application to send requests to Upgrade Responder server every --query-period interval

See here for more details about InfluxDB continuous queries.

Geography database

This project includes GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from here.

This program doesn't store IP. Only the city level geographic data is recorded.

For Contributor

1. Building Upgrade Responder project

make

2. Running locally

./bin/upgrade-responder --debug start --upgrade-response-config /etc/upgrade-responder/upgrade-response.json --application-name postman --influxdb-url http://localhost:8086 --influxdb-user admin --influxdb-pass admin123 --geodb /etc/upgrade-checker/GeoLite2-City.mmdb

It will listen on 0.0.0.0:8314

License

Copyright (c) 2021 Longhorn Authors

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.