Starting, stopping, and monitoring Zowe containers

After Zowe's containers are installed and configured, you can refer to the following topics that help you manage your installation.

Starting Zowe containers

The Kubernetes cluster will automatically start as many containers as needed per service according to the Deployment configuration.

To apply the deployment files, run this command:

kubectl apply -f workloads/

Port forwarding (for minikube only)

Kubectl port-forward allows you to access and interact with internal Kubernetes cluster processes from your localhost. For debugging or development, you might want to port forward to make Zowe gateway or discovery service available externally quickly.

Before issuing port forward commands, make sure that gateway and discovery services pods are running. You can run kubectl get pods -n zowe and check if the STATUS of both discovery-* and gateway-* is RUNNING. If not, you may have to wait.

Once both STATUS shows RUNNING, run the following command to port forward:

kubectl port-forward -n zowe svc/gateway-service --address=<your-ip> <external-port>:<internal-port, such as 7554> &
kubectl port-forward -n zowe svc/discovery-service --address=<your-ip> <external-port>:<internal-port, such as 7553> &

The & sign at the command will run the command as a background process. Otherwise, the port forward process will occupy the terminal indefinitely until canceled as a foreground service.

Verifying Zowe containers

The containers will start soon after applying the deployments.

To verify:

1. kubectl get deployments --namespace zowe

   This command must show you a list of deployments including explorer-jes, gateway-service, app-server, etc. Each deployment should show 1/1 in READY column. It could take a moment before all deployments say 1/1.

2. kubectl get statefulsets --namespace zowe

   This command must show you a StatefulSet discovery which READY column should be 1/1.

3. kubectl get cronjobs --namespace zowe

   This command must show you a CronJob cleanup-static-definitions which SUSPEND should be False.

Monitoring Zowe containers

You can monitor Zowe containers using a UI or CLI.

Monitoring Zowe containers via UI

Kubernetes provides a container that allows you to manage your cluster through a web browser. When using Docker Desktop, it is already installed in the namespace kubernetes-dashboard. See the Kubernetes website for install instructions.

Metrics Server is also recommended and is required if you want to define Horizontal Pod Autoscaler. Check if you have metrics-server Service in kube-system namespace with this command kubectl get services --namespace kube-system. If you don't have it, you can follow this Installation instruction to install it.

Monitoring Zowe containers via CLI

kubectl allows you to see the status of any kind of object with the get command. This applies to the table in the Configuring article but also for the pods that run the Zowe containers.

Here are a few commands you can use to monitor your environment:

• kubectl get pods -n zowe lists the status of the components of Zowe.
• kubectl describe pods -n zowe <podid> can see more details about each pod.
• kubectl logs -n zowe <podid> will show you the terminal output of a particular pod, with -f allowing you to keep the logs open as new messages are added.
• kubectl get nodes -n zowe -owide will tell you more about the environment you're running.

Stopping, pausing or removing Zowe containers

To temporarily stop a component, locate the Deployment component and scale down to 0. For example, if you want to stop the api-catalog container, run this command:

kubectl scale -n zowe deployment api-catalog --replicas=0

You can later re-enable a component by scaling the component back to 1 or more.

If you want to permanently remove a component, you can delete the component Deployment. To use api-catalog as an example, run this command:

kubectl delete -n zowe deployment api-catalog