Best Practices In Kubernetes Monitoring

If you ever wanted to know and understand the best way to monitor your software development application’s current state with an open-source tool, then you might want to consider Kubernetes monitoring. Monitoring challenges can be endless when dealing with software development and bottlenecked production environments. As a company, you often have to consider how to handle application software challenges.

Software challenges that range from inexperienced team members to project deadlines and management concerns. There is a movement to head off any problems best demonstrated by the growing adoption of microservices. The microservices implement best practices in Kubernetes monitoring through open-source tools. 

There are some best practices in Kubernetes monitoring you may want to check out that provide an effective and efficient analysis of the distributed and diversified number of applications.  Please keep reading about the best practices available in Kubernetes monitoring to help prevent even one point of failure that shuts down your entire IT process. 

Best Practices in Kubernetes Monitoring

You always want to remember that Kubernetes container monitoring doesn’t require many binaries, libraries, or elements. Kubernetes monitoring can work with a minimal operating system. But it’s also important to remember some of the best practices of Kubernetes monitoring, which don’t require a great deal of effort do need to be known and practiced.

1. Dig Deep

You don’t want to waste your time by staying on the surface of your operating system; instead, with Kubernetes monitoring, you want to dig deep. It’s essential to get down to the granular data level to ascertain how the processes are running and interacting with ports, files, memory, network, and more. 

2. Historical System Data Beyond Metrics

Containers are ephemeral, which means determining what went wrong with one can be somewhat elusive to find. That’s why having metrics and log data help, but Kubernetes monitoring helps even more. Kubernetes monitoring captures historical data beyond metrics because it captures all host activity around each event. 

3. Know Your Kubernetes Control Plane Monitoring 

The Kubernetes cluster depends on the Kubernetes control plane. The control plane manages vital functions, cluster resources and reads all the data and secrets within the cluster. If you don’t monitor the Kubernetes control plane, it’s like driving a car without paying attention to the road you’re on.

Most of the time, your Kubernetes control plane components are the Kubelet, API Server, Kube-proxy, controller manager, Kube-DNS, and a few more.

4. Instrumenting Strategy with Kubernetes Alerting 

There are many different instrumenting strategies in gathering metrics from a system. However, if you want to use Kubernetes best practices, you should inject an instrumentation library into your containers. Libraries only have a certain amount of data a container can see, which sometimes makes it difficult to debug. 

User space can combine an informational probe with an open-source tool like Prometheus. There are a variety of open-source tools that are used for best practices in Kubernetes monitoring. 

5. Use a Platform and Run Containers of Physical or Virtual Machine Clusters

Kubernetes helps you optimize your application development for the cloud by giving you a platform to schedule and run containers of physical or virtual machine clusters. But Kubernetes is best known for its automation of operational tasks, which allows you to do the same for your application platform, containers, and management systems. The best practices of Kubernetes monitoring are often used by developers when they run containers of physical or virtual machine clusters.

Developers use the Kubernetes patterns with a runtime platform to create cloud-native and container-based applications and services. Developers also like Kubernetes best practice for its reduction of downtime and increasing the security that it provides.

6. Kubernetes Monitoring Prometheus

Prometheus exposed to Kubernetes service are the node, endpoint, service, pod, and ingress. One of the open-source instrumentation frameworks Kubernetes uses is Prometheus. Prometheus can absorb a tremendous amount of data every second, which is why it’s so popular with complex workloads.

Prometheus is a workhorse that draws on your data to analyze application performance and infrastructure. Prometheus can obtain machine-level metrics in addition to application information. Prometheus is easy enough to install through a Kubernetes cluster if you use Yet Another Markup Language (YAML). 

YAML can be reused indefinitely and allow Prometheus to pull information from the cluster elements through the file configurations and permission services.  

7. Kubernetes Monitoring Tools Provide a Comprehensive Kubernetes Solution

There is always a need for new monitoring frameworks, and in Kubernetes, you have two technology framework uses. DevOps requires monitoring that is made accessible, covers additional layers of the stack, and needs to be democratized. That’s why there are many Kubernetes monitoring tools with around ten that are considered to be top-tiered like Prometheus.

The monitoring tools help log, debug, and provide high availability to countless and extremely unstable software entities. Grafana is a robust monitoring tool that helps integrate data sources. If you need log aggregation and processing, you might want to try out the Fluentd monitoring tool. Fluentd acts as a logging layer unified by a one-stop component capable of aggregating data from multiple sources.

cAdvisor is built into Kubernetes on the node level. cAdvisor auto-discovers containers and can collect metrics in the system, including memory, network, and more. The Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kabana (ELK) Stack is the most popular open-source monitoring tool providing a comprehensive Kubernetes solution.

Your Next Open Source Tool Should Include Monitoring Kubernetes

There are also some firmly delineated best practices you can use in your quest to deploy applications in the most impactful manner. Kubernetes doesn’t answer all your monitoring needs but is a step in the right direction. Whatever method you choose for best practices in Kubernetes monitoring depends on your operating system and whom you have on your technology team. Reach out to apica.io when you’re ready to manage complex environments that have large application clusters.

apica.io will help you find new ways to maximize your monitoring results while keeping your losses at a minimum because you avoid almost all downtime. There’s nothing like safeguarding your business, so reach out to apica.io today and take your technology to the next level seamlessly.