Installation Tips and Tricks

The Install Keptn page documents how to install Keptn. This page provides some background and more examples that supplement that information.

Umbrella chart

Keptn v0.9.0 and later is installed using a Helm umbrella chart. This means that the Helm Chart that installs all of Keptn actually groups subcharts for individual components and you can install individual components without installing all of Keptn.

Keptn is installed using the Keptn umbrella Helm chart. Each subchart has its own README file describing possible configuration options, but configuration changes for the subcharts are added to a single values.yaml file. See Customizing the configuration of components for an example.

Installing older versions of Keptn

Installation of Keptn v0.9.0 has two significant differences compared to the installation of earlier releases:

Keptn v0.9.0 and later releases use the umbrella charts whereas earlier versions did not
Keptn v0.9.0 and later releases use the keptn Helm chart, whereas earlier releases used the klt chart.

To install a version prior to v0.9.0, use the install command sequence that is documented for that release. To install the latest version, use the installation commands on the Install Keptn Install Keptn page.

To install an older release, specify the chart version with the --version flag in the helm upgrade --install command for the release you are installing.

Example configurations by use-case

Control what components are installed discusses how to configure Keptn to include only the components you want. The following sections summarize and give examples of the configurations needed for different use cases.

Enable Keptn Lifecycle Operator (Observability and/or Release Lifecycle)

If you only want to run the Keptn Observability and/or Release Lifecycle use-cases in your cluster, you do not need to install the Keptn Metrics Operator. To disable it, set the metricsOperator.enabled value to false as in the following:

certManager:
  enabled: true
lifecycleOperator:
  enabled: true
metricsOperator:
  enabled: false

Note that, if you want to run pre- and/or post-deployment evaluations as part of the Release Lifecycle use-case, you need to have the Keptn Metrics Operator installed.

You must also enable Keptn for each namespace on which you want to run either the Observability or Release Lifecycle use-case.

To enable Keptn, annotate the appropriate Namespace resource(s). For example, for the simplenode-dev namespace, the annotation looks like this:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: simplenode-dev
  annotations:
    keptn.sh/lifecycle-toolkit: "enabled"

You see the annotation line keptn.sh/lifecycle-toolkit: "enabled".

After enabling Keptn for your namespace(s), you are ready to Integrate Keptn with your applications.

For more information about implementing Observability, see the Observability User Guide.

For more information about implementing Keptn Release Lifecycle, see the Deployment tasks and Evaluations User Guides.

Enable Keptn Metrics Operator (Metrics)

If you are only interested in Metrics, you do not need the Keptn Lifecycle Operator. Disable it using the following values.yaml:

certManager:
  enabled: true
lifecycleOperator:
  enabled: false
metricsOperator:
  enabled: true

For more information about implementing Metrics, see the Metrics User Guide.

Enable Keptn Analysis (SLOs/SLIs)

To enable Keptn Analysis in your cluster, you again do not need the Keptn Lifcycle Operator. Disable it using the following values.yaml:

certManager:
  enabled: true
lifecycleOperator:
  enabled: false
metricsOperator:
  enabled: true

Note A preliminary release of the Keptn Analysis feature is included in Keptn v0.8.3 and v0.9.0 but is hidden behind a feature flag. See the Analysis reference page for how to activate the preview of this feature.

For more information about implementing Keptn Analysis, see the Analysis User Guide.

Disable Keptn Certificate Manager (Certificates)

If you wish to use your own custom certificate manager, you can disable the Keptn cert-manager by using the --set certificateManager.enabled=false argument to the helm upgrade command line or you can modify the values.yaml file:

certManager:
  enabled: false

For more information about using cert-manager with Keptn, see Use Keptn with cert-manager.io.