Kubernetes - Logging and Monitoring

Introduction

• Monitoring is a crucial aspect of maintaining the reliability, availability, and performance of your Kubernetes clusters.
• Below is a brief overview of the few monitoring solutions::

1. cAdvisor:
   • cAdvisor (Container Advisor) is a built-in component of Kubelet that provides metrics about CPU, memory, network usage, and filesystem information for containers in a pod.
   • These metrics are exposed via the Kubelet API and are available to the Metrics Server or other monitoring solutions.
2. Metrics Server:
   • The Metrics Server is a in-memory scalable, efficient source of container resource metrics for Kubernetes built-in autoscaling pipelines.
   • It collects resource metrics from Kubelet and exposes them in Kubernetes API server through Metrics API.
   • Metrics Server is not meant for non-autoscaling purposes. For example, don’t use it to forward metrics to monitoring solutions, or as a source of monitoring solution metrics.
   • Example: kubectl top
3. Prometheus:
   • An open-source monitoring system with a dimensional data model, flexible query language, efficient time series database and modern alerting approach.
4. Grafana:
   • An open-source platform for time series analytics. It can visualize the data stored in Prometheus and alert on specific metrics.
5. Datadog:
   • A commercial monitoring service that provides a comprehensive view of the entire stack, including Kubernetes.
6. New Relic:
   • A commercial application performance monitoring tool that also provides Kubernetes monitoring.
7. Elastic Stack (ELK Stack):
   • Elasticsearch for search, Logstash for centralized logging and Kibana for visualization.
   • It can be used to monitor Kubernetes as well.
8. Dynatrace:
   • A commercial software intelligence platform that provides AIOps, cloud infrastructure monitoring, and digital experience management, including Kubernetes monitoring.
9. Sysdig:
   • A commercial tool that provides unified security, monitoring, and forensics for containers and microservices.
10. Splunk:
    • A commercial tool used for searching, monitoring, and examining machine-generated big data.
11. Jaeger:
    • An open-source, end-to-end distributed tracing system for cloud-native apps.