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Installing Digma in your organization

In this simple guide, we’ll go over the basic steps required to move beyond local deployment and get Digma up and running in your organization.

Understanding the Deployment Architecture

Digma is deployed into the K8s cluster into its own namespace. Depending on your application deployment architecture you may want to deploy Digma with different parameters to enable the right connectivity.

You should pay attention to the following regarding the deployment architecture:

  • Collector-API – This architecture assumes that the application can send observability data to the IP/DNS of this endpoint. You may need to configure your setup to allow this traffic. You may also choose to expose it as a public IP in your deployment (see below under Cloud Deployment)
  • Plugin-API – This endpoint needs to be accessible to the IDE plugin. If you are deploying Digma into your internal network and use a VPN to access that IP you can choose not to expose this service as a public IP (see below under Cloud Deployment).
  • Jaeger – Digma bundles its own Jaeger service that aggregates sample traces for various insights, performance metrics, and exceptions. If you do not wish to expose this endpoint or prefer to configure your own APM as the trace source, you can choose to disable this endpoint. Digma does offer enhancements over Jaeger such as a two-way mapping between the code and the trace.

Deploying the Digma backend

Prerequisites: Access to a Kubernetes cluster and having Helm installed locally

The recommended way to install Digma in your org is using our Helm chart.

Step 1: Add the Digma Helm repo 

helm repo add digma https://digma-ai.github.io/helm-chart/
helm repo update

Step 2: Deploy Digma using Helm

You’ll need to provide the following parameters in the example below:

  • API_TOKEN (any string) – This is a unique key you’ll need to provide any IDE that connects to this Digma instance
  • ENV_NAME – A name for this Digma deployment. This can be your org name or any name that would make sense to you
  • ENABLE_JAEGER (true/false) – Setting this to True will expose the port for the Jaeger instance included with Digma. If you’re using your own APM and want to link to that instead, you can leave that at the default value (false)
helm install digma digma/digma --set digmaPluginApi.accesstoken=[API_TOKEN],digma.environmentName=[ENV_NAME],embeddedJaeger.enabled=[ENABLE_JAEGER] --namespace digma --create-namespace

Cloud Deployment

If you’re deploying Digma to a cloud Kubernetes provides such as EKS/AKS or just a publicly hosted K8s cluster, there are additional control parameters you can set:

  • digmaPluginApi.expose (true/false) – Controls whether the API used to communicate with the IDE plugin is exposed via a public IP (though protected with the API_TOKEN) or on the internal network only
  • digmaCollectorApi.expose – Controls the same setting for the collector API (receiving inbound observability from your application)

Step 3: Validating the deployment

To check everything is working properly we can check the pod status and make sure they are all in the ‘Running’ state:

kubectl get pods -n digma

For example, this is the expected output:

Step 4: Get the IP/DNS value for the Digma deployment

Run the following command to get the address assigned to the Collector, Plugin-API, and Jaeger endpoints (if enabled). You’ll need these to complete the setup. Note that external load balancers for public IPs may take additional time to set up the address.

kubectl get services --namespace digma

Depending on your setup type get the public or internal IP for the following services:

  • Collector-API: digma-collector-api or digma-collector-api-service-lb if you have selected to expose this service externally
  • Plugin-API: digma-plugin-api-service-lb
  • Jaeger: digma-embedded-jaeger-lb

Capture these addresses as you’ll need them later to setup your IDE plugin.

Step 5: Final validation

You can try calling the following API to validate connectivity and ensure Digma is up and running. You’ll need to use the Plugin-API address you’ve captured in the above step as well as the API_TOKEN you’ve provided when deploying the Helm chart.

curl -k -X ‘GET’ \ ‘https://<PLUGIN-API>:5051/api/Diagnostic’ \ -H “Authorization: Token <API_TOKEN>” -H ‘accept: application/json’ 

If you received a non-error response back you’re good to go for the next step!

Connecting your IDE to the Org Digma deployment

Once Digma is up and running you can now set your IDE plugin to connect to it. To do that, open the plugin settings (Go to IntelliJ IDEA -> Settings/Preferences and search for ‘Digma’)

  • Set the ‘Digma API URL’ parameter using the PLUGIN-API value you’ve captured previously (By default this should be prefixed as ‘https’ and use port 5051)
  • Set the ‘Runtime observability backend URL’ parameter using the ‘COLLECTOR-API’ value you’ve captured previously
  • Set the ‘Api token’ parameter using the string value you used as a token when setting up the helm deployment
  • Set the ‘Jaeger Query URL’ (if this option was enabled) using the JAEGER address you’ve captured previously.

Click ‘Apply’/’Ok’ to enable the changes and check that the Digma UI is not showing any connection errors.