Querying metrics exposed by KEDA Metrics Server

The metrics exposed by KEDA Metrics Server can be queried directly using kubectl:

kubectl get --raw "/apis/external.metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1"

This will return a json with the list of metrics exposed by KEDA (external metrics only):

{
  "kind": "APIResourceList",
  "apiVersion": "v1",
  "groupVersion": "external.metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1",
  "resources": [
    {
      "name": "externalmetrics",
      "singularName": "",
      "namespaced": true,
      "kind": "ExternalMetricValueList",
      "verbs": [
        "get"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

In order to query a specific metric value, you also can do it using kubectl:

kubectl get --raw "/apis/external.metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/YOUR_NAMESPACE/YOUR_METRIC_NAME?labelSelector=scaledobject.keda.sh%2Fname%3D{SCALED_OBJECT_NAME}"

At this point, you should take in consideration that KEDA metrics are namespaced, this means that you have to specify the namespace where the ScaledObject is placed inside.

For example, if you want to get the value of the metric named s1-rabbitmq-queueName2, that is used by ScaledObject named my-scaled-object in namespace sample-ns, the query will be like this:

kubectl get --raw "/apis/external.metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1/namespaces/sample-ns/s1-rabbitmq-queueName2?labelSelector=scaledobject.keda.sh%2Fname%3Dmy-scaled-object"

And it will show a json like this:

{
  "kind": "ExternalMetricValueList",
  "apiVersion": "external.metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1",
  "metadata": {},
  "items": [
    {
      "metricName": "s1-rabbitmq-queueName2",
      "metricLabels": null,
      "timestamp": "2021-10-20T10:48:17Z",
      "value": "0"
    }
  ]
}

Note: There are 2 exceptions in querying metrics and those are cpu and memory scalers. When KEDA creates the HPA object, it uses standard cpu and memory metrics from the Kubernetes Metrics Server. If you want to query these 2 specific values, you should do it using /apis/metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1 instead of /apis/external.metrics.k8s.io/v1beta1.

How to get metric names from ScaledObject

During its work, KEDA updates each ScaledObject with some relevant information which it needs to work. Part of that information is metric names generated from the triggers inside the own ScaledObject.

You can recover the metric names from a ScaledObject using kubectl:

 kubectl get scaledobject SCALEDOBJECT_NAME -n NAMESPACE -o jsonpath={.status.externalMetricNames}