Kubernetes Observability (Monitoring) Guide
Last updated
Last updated
In Kubernetes operations, there are several key aspects that you should monitor to ensure the health, performance, and availability of your cluster and applications. Here are some important areas to consider:
Cluster health: Monitor the overall health of your Kubernetes cluster, including the status and availability of master and worker nodes. Keep an eye on metrics such as CPU and memory utilization, disk space, and network connectivity.
Node performance: Monitor individual worker nodes for resource utilization, including CPU, memory, and disk usage. This helps you identify potential bottlenecks or capacity issues on specific nodes.
Pod status: Check the status of your application pods to ensure they are running as expected. Monitor for pod failures, restarts, and termination events. Also, keep an eye on pod conditions such as readiness and liveness.
Container logs: Monitor the logs generated by your containers running within the pods. Logs provide valuable insights into the behavior of your applications and can help troubleshoot issues.
Resource utilization: Track resource usage at the pod and container level. Monitor CPU and memory utilization to ensure that your applications have enough resources to operate effectively.
Networking: Monitor network traffic and connectivity within the cluster. Keep an eye on network latency, packet loss, and throughput. Additionally, monitor load balancers, ingress controllers, and service endpoints to ensure proper routing and connectivity.
Application metrics: Monitor application-specific metrics such as response times, request rates, error rates, and throughput. This helps you understand the performance and behavior of your applications running on Kubernetes.
Scalability and autoscaling: Monitor the performance and effectiveness of your autoscaling configurations. Keep track of metrics that trigger scaling events, such as CPU or memory utilization thresholds.
Persistent volumes: Monitor the health and capacity of your persistent volumes (PVs) and persistent volume claims (PVCs). Ensure that storage resources are available and functioning correctly.
Security and compliance: Implement monitoring for security-related events, such as unauthorized access attempts, security policy violations, or abnormal behavior that may indicate a security breach.
There are several monitoring tools available for Kubernetes, such as Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, and Datadog. These tools can help you collect, visualize, and alert on the relevant metrics and events in your Kubernetes environment.
