Customizing Playbooks

Robusta needs rules to tell it what to do. These rules are called “playbooks”.

On this page, we configure a new playbook that monitors deployments. It will notify in Slack every time the number of replicas changes.

Enabling the playbook

Playbooks are configured with the customPlaybooks helm value.

1. Add the following to generated_values.yaml:

customPlaybooks:
- triggers:
    - on_deployment_update: {}
  actions:
    - resource_babysitter:
        fields_to_monitor: ["spec.replicas"]

2. Perform an upgrade with Helm to apply the new configuration

helm upgrade robusta robusta/robusta --values=generated_values.yaml

How the playbook works

Every playbook configuration has three parts.

triggers:

We chose on_deployment_update so our playbook runs every time deployments are updated

actions:

We chose resource_babysitter which is a builtin action. It has several parameters that influence behaviour including fields_to_monitor .

sinks:

We didn’t configure any sinks, so output is sent to the default sink. This is usually Slack.

Testing the playbook

1. Scale one of your deployments:

kubectl scale --replicas NEW_REPLICAS_COUNT deployments/DEPLOYMENT_NAME

2. Check the slack channel you configured when installing Robusta:

Example Slack Message

Next steps

Try changing the configuration in values.yaml so that Robusta monitors changes to a deployment’s image tag too.