Skip to main content
Just getting started with Refinery?Check out the Introduction to Refinery course in the Honeycomb Academy! This guided tour walks you through configuring and managing sampling strategies with Refinery, so you can get hands-on experience before deploying to your production environment.
Set up Honeycomb Refinery on Kubernetes, or in Linux x86-64/AMD64 and Linux ARM64 environments. Refinery is designed to sit within your infrastructure where all sources of Honeycomb events can reach it. A standard deployment will have a cluster of servers running Refinery accessible via a load balancer. Refinery instances must be able to communicate with each other to concentrate traces on single servers. For the quickest way to get started using Refinery:
  1. Meet system requirements before starting
  2. Download and install the latest version of Refinery
  3. Set up your cluster of Refinery processes
  4. Customize your configuration and sampling rules

​
System Requirements

To begin, your Refinery cluster requires a minimum of:
  • a linux/amd64 or linux/arm64 operating system
  • 2GB RAM for each server used
  • Access to 2 cores for each server used
In many cases, Refinery only needs one node. If experiencing a large volume of traffic, you may need multiple Refinery nodes, and likely need a small Redis instance to handle scaling. We recommend increasing the amount of RAM and the number of cores after your initial set-up. Use our scale and troubleshooting documentation to learn more.

​
Getting Started

The recommended way to run Refinery on Kubernetes is with its Helm chart.
  1. Add the Honeycomb Helm repository. 
    helm repo add honeycomb https://honeycombio.github.io/helm-charts
  2. Update the Honeycomb repository to ensure that helm has the latest chart versions. 
    helm repo update honeycomb
  3. Install the latest version of the Refinery Helm chart with default values. 
    helm install refinery honeycomb/refinery
Helm chart versions and Refinery versions are not in sync. For example, Refinery chart version 2.15.5 installs Refinery version 2.9.4. When installing a specific version, you can check the Refinery Helm chart documentation to see which chart version installs the version of Refinery you want.

​
Command Line Flags

The Refinery executable has the following command line flags: -c, --config= : Path to config file (default: /etc/refinery/refinery.yaml) -r, --rules_config= : Path to rules config file (default: /etc/refinery/rules.yaml) -v, --version : Print version number and exit -d, --debug : If enabled, runs debug service (runs on the first open port between localhost:6060 and :6069 by default). Can be used with a debug service, which allows you to use pprof to visualize and analyze profiling data. -h, --help : Show help message

​
Set Up Your Refinery Cluster

Be sure to keep configuration in-sync between the Refinery processes, so that your traces are consistent.
Ensure that your Refinery cluster(s) meet the minimum system requirements. We recommend that your list of Refinery peers be configured through Redis (see Redis-based peer management). The Redis server can be small since it only maintains the list of peers. Should the Redis service become unavailable, Refinery instances will continue to use their last known peer list for inter-peer communication.
Refinery does not currently support Redis Cluster or the Redis Sentinel protocol.
For services that are currently sending events directly to Honeycomb’s API, update these services’ Honeycomb API Host property to be the URL for your Refinery cluster’s load balancer to start sampling events with Refinery.

​
Refinery Configuration

The default configuration at installation will allow you to run Refinery without any other changes. Be sure to run Refinery in Dry Run Mode to verify your configuration before dropping traffic. To tune Refinery to your needs, Refinery’s configuration requires additional changes in two files: As you modify, check out our scale and troubleshooting documentation for recommendations and strategies.