CRI-O (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an implementation of the Kubernetes CRI (Container Runtime Interface) to enable OCI (Open Container Initiative) compatible runtimes. It is a lightweight alternative to using Docker as the runtime for Kubernetes (K8s). Instana’s comprehensive CRI-O monitoring goes beyond simple container metrics with automatic discovery, deployment, configuration, health determination, and performance monitoring at multiple levels:
- Automated discovery and monitoring of each CRI-O container
- Automated discovery of technologies operating within all CRI-O containers
- Real-time dependency mapping and monitoring of all applications running across the entire system
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CRI-O allows K8s to use any OCI-compliant runtime for running pods. Additionally, CRI-O has support for OCI container images and is able to pull from any container registry. As such, CRI-O has been gaining in popularity as a replacement for Docker service as the container engine for Kubernetes implementations. Monitoring CRI-O environments and the applications running on those containers requires the ability to understand how different application components run within a CRI-O environment.
Managing CRI-O based applications requires performance visibility at the host, container, component, and code level. Instana automates the discovery and monitoring of CRI-O applications. After a quick installation of the Instana agent into the virtual or physical host, the agent automatically discovers all containers and software components running in the environment, deploys the appropriate monitoring sensors, and begins tracing every application request end-to-end.
Instana automatically detects CRI-O running on the host and, with no manual effort, deploys and configures Instana’s CRI-O monitoring sensor. By referencing its curated knowledge base, Instana understands which performance metrics are relevant to collect and must be configured. Instana’s automatic configuration for CRI-O is set to track things like ID, Name, Image, IP, and Created.
Typical CRI-O monitoring metrics include:
- CPU usage
- Memory usage
- CPU throttling
- Block IO
In addition to automatically collecting performance metrics, the Instana CRI-O monitoring sensor automatically collects KPIs on the CRI-O process to determine its health. Health signatures from the curated knowledge base are used to raise Issues or Incidents depending on user impact. The primary resource is Memory exhausted for which Instana collects various KPIs.