Install Gremlin on Kubernetes manually

The Gremlin Kubernetes agent lets you run experiments and reliability tests on standard Kubernetes resources, as well as Argo Rollouts. This section will guide you through installing the Gremlin Agent using only YAML files. We only recommend using this method if installing via Helm is not suitable for your use case.

Gremlin provides an automatically generated YAML file with everything needed to deploy Gremlin to your cluster. Deploying Gremlin is as easy as downloading this file and applying it using kubectl.

1. Log into your Gremlin account and navigate to the Getting Started page.
2. Under step 1 ("Install the Gremlin agent"), look for the link to download gremlin-k8s-installation.yaml . Click on this link to download the file.
3. Optionally, to give your cluster a unique name, open the file, navigate to the "Chao" deployment, and change the value of spec.template.spec.containers.args."cluster_id" to your preferred cluster name. Otherwise, Gremlin will use a randomly generated value for the cluster name.
4. On your workstation, open a terminal, navigate to the folder containing the YAML file, then run the following command:

kubectl apply -f gremlin-k8s-installation.yaml

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Verify your installation

On the cluster, you can run the following command to check that the Gremlin Agent was installed properly:

kubectl get pods -n gremlin

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This should list one Gremlin Agent for each node in your cluster, plus one Pod named <span class="code-class-name">chao</span>. For example, this is the output for a three-node cluster:

kubectl get pods -n gremlin

NAME                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
chao-78bbc7cbf6-9hn7q   1/1     Running   0          5d20h
gremlin-9r4t7           1/1     Running   0          5d20h
gremlin-bwmtz           1/1     Running   1          126d
gremlin-bx6dn           1/1     Running   0          5d20h

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The following example shows 2 pending pods, which means the installation is incomplete. Contact your cluster administrator to debug why Gremlin is unable to run on those nodes.

kubectl get pods -n gremlin

NAME                    READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
chao-78bbc7cbf6-9hn7q   1/1     Running   0          5d20h
gremlin-c25ld           0/1     Pending   0          112d
gremlin-n5gt7           0/1     Pending   0          112d
gremlin-zn4kq           1/1     Running   0          126d

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If you need additional troubleshooting help, see Gremlin Agent in the Gremlin Knowledge Base.

Uninstalling Gremlin from Kubernetes

To uninstall Gremlin from a Kubernetes cluster using YAML, simply delete the gremlin namespace by running the following command:

kubectl delete namespace gremlin