Complete Kubernetes (K8s) monitoring requires layers of configuration data, performance metrics and monitoring. Instana automates the entire process of monitoring containerized applications, including automatic recognition of the application components, platforms, technologies, containers, Kubernetes and – finally – the container service engine, such as OpenShift or IBM Cloud. Once installed, Instana will discover all containers (both orchestrated and not orchestrated), deploy monitoring sensors for each application component, map the application dependencies and begin monitoring full stack application performance.
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Kubernetes (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an open-source platform that focuses on automating container management in a flexible and dynamic way. Its various parts all build on one another to orchestrate an entire microservices environment. Kubernetes groups containers running on the same host machine into pods and assigns key-value pair tags for identifying and sorting them. Pods then execute on service requests from either human users or other environment components acting as clients. Internal controllers constantly match the actual system state with the desired state called for in the configuration, and subsequently clone, distribute, and run pods to produce that desired state. For more details, please see the Kubernetes documentation (link resides outside of ibm.com).
After deployment into a client environment, Instana will automatically map out the entire infrastructure and identify how the different technologies are interacting with one another with its Dynamic Graph back-end model.
Learn More: Kubernetes vs Docker (link resides outside of ibm.com)
The Instana Kubernetes monitoring sensor automatically detects the containers running in the service and the platforms running on the containers, deploying additional sensors to gather performance metrics of the full application stack..
The effectiveness of Kubernetes resources management is captured in typical metrics such as:
- CPU Usage
- Memory Usage
- Block IO
Instana also collects specific Kubernetes configurations for display in the UI dashboards. The agent sensor will automatically identify different Kubernetes components such as pods and containers, indexing them and making them searchable by users directly from the same dashboards that display the resource management performance.
In addition to monitoring Kubernetes’ performance metrics, the Instana agent sensor will also collect health metrics on the Kubernetes platform itself. The health state is displayed in the UI in real-time as healthy, sick, or failing. In a containerized environment there are a lot of moving parts that can break down. The Kubernetes API server’s HTTP connection could break down, pods can get mistagged causing resources to get mismanaged, or user error could cause a scheduler to get unplugged. Instana’s real-time health monitoring allows DevOps engineers to ensure their valuable Kubernetes platforms manage their microservices environments smoothly.