Introduction to Kubernetes monitoring
In Kubernetes monitoring, as the name suggests with the help of this we do a report which helps us to keep track of our cluster, by the use of this we can easily manage our cluster. By managing clusters through monitoring helps and eases to keep track of the infrastructure resources which can include resources such as memory, storage CPU etc. With the help of monitoring, we can even alert for specific events suppose if any of the pods are not running then we can receive alerts for this. Also, it keeps track of any failure, limit reach for particular resources, or pods that are no longer working then we can keep this track or monitor this with the help of Kubernetes monitoring, in the coming section of the tutorial we will see its internal working in detail for better clarity and understanding.
Why is Kubernetes monitoring Important?
There will always be a benefit and importance of doing monitoring of our application because it helps us to keep track of the activity going on for the application and let us inform about the performance, failure, memory etc. As we have already discussed but let’s starts with the some of the major important factors of the Kubernetes monitoring which states why it is important to see below;
1) It helps us to generate the reporting, which helps us to manage our clusters.
2) With the help of this we can easily generate alerts in case of any failure.
3) We can keep track of the pods running and what are all ones taking part.
4) By the use of this we can keep track of the resources such as storage, memory, CPU etc.
5) It helps organizations to take a deeper look at the application.
6) With the help of this we can take a deeper look at the docker, containerization, cluster, and other infrastructure parts.
Top Kubernetes Monitoring Tools
Kubernetes provides us with many open-source tools which help us to monitor your application and its infrastructure in detail. It also provides us with many add-ons but it’s very complex. As we saw that continuous monitoring of our application is very important and we have many numbers of free solutions which provide us with the free monitoring of the application, here we will be going to discuss the various tools provided by Kubernetes to monitor the application are as follows;
1. Grafana: It is one of the tool for monitoring, it is also an open-source platform which is used for the visualization and analytics. It provides us with four dashboards which help us to monitor our application which simply includes deployment, Cluster, Pod/Container, Node. Inside Kubernetes, we can easily install Grafana, with the help of Kubernetes admin. So it is easy to use, handle and help to monitor every part of the application also.
2. Prometheus: It is also one of the monitor tool, and an open-source platforms which we can use for alerting, it is very popular among the monitor tools. It helps us to get the metrics, analysis, and docker information. This tool basically designs to monitor our application and also microservices which are running inside the scale of the container. It does not provide any dashboard because it is not, but we can integrate this with Grafana tool which we discuss before, to visualize our data of application with the help of dashboard it provides.
3. Dashboard: It is a Kubernetes Dashboard, which helps us to visualization of data, it is said to be a UI for the Kubernetes clusters, which allows us to monitor the health of the application, status, and workloads etc.
4. Jaeger: It is also one of the monitoring tools, which is basically helps in the troubleshoot, transactions in the complex distributed systems. It is basically designed to address the software issues which can be arises due to distributed system such as context propagation, transactions, latency monitor and any more. So it is basically designed to monitoring distributed systems etc.
5. Weave Scope: It is also a tool which is used for monitoring and visualization of the infrastructure metrics. It also covers the entire infrastructure for us, it is originally developed by the Weaveworks, it is also an graphical UI which helps us to visualization the statistics by the helps of this we can easily run the commands on the containers and manage them.
6. InfluxDB: It is basically designed for stirring very high volume monitoring logs or records. also provide high availability, scalability, with clustering. It can be considered as the long time storage of monitoring data which can serve as the historic data or records later.
Best Kubernetes monitoring practices methods
We have seven different monitoring practices methods which should be followed, hence mentioned below. So let’s get started
1) We should dig more for system visibility
2) We should capture the historical system data
3) try to inspect the Kubernetes control panel for detail.
4) Look more into the dashboards and alerts for details investigation
5) Try to choose SaaS based monitoring system
6) we should try to evaluate the strategy
7) Embedded context
Kubernetes Monitoring Solution
Monitoring solution means how we can do the monitoring of our system, which we have discussed already by using the tools, we have several different open-source tools which helps us and provide us the solution to monitor the application.
Also, we have seen the best-practice methods which help and guide us to do the best possible approach to monitor the system, like we can monitor the control panel, it also provides us different components to do so. Some of the solutions for monitoring are mentioned below;
- cAdvisor
- The ELK Stack
- kubewatch
- kube-ops-view
- Prometheus Operator
- and many more
Conclusion
As we have seen all the benefits, why to use and how it helps us to monitor our application, it also keeps track of the failure, go through the whole article to understand the importance of the Kubernetes monitoring, easy to use, maintainable and handle by the developers.
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This is a guide to Kubernetes monitoring. Here we discuss the internal working in detail for better clarity and understanding. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –