Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We created the Fleet Project to provide centralized GitOps-style management of a large number of Kubernetes clusters. A key design goal of Fleet is to be able to manage 1 million geographically distributed clusters. When we architected Fleet, we wanted to use a standard Kubernetes controller architecture. This meant in order to scale, we needed to prove we could scale Kubernetes much farther than we ever had.

We dedicate a lot of space in our blog to the topic of monitoring. That’s because when you’re managing Kubernetes clusters, things can change quickly. It’s important that you have tools to monitor the health and resource metrics of your clusters. In Rancher 2.5, we introduced a new version of our monitoring based on the Prometheus Operator, which provides Kubernetes-native deployment and management of Prometheus and related monitoring components.

If you’re an SRE or on a DevOps team working with Kubernetes and containers, you’ve undoubtedly encountered network connectivity issues with your microservices and workloads. Something is broken and you’re under pressure to fix it, quickly. And so you begin the tedious, manual process of identifying the issue using the observability tools at your disposal…namely metrics and logs.

The new Honeycomb Kubernetes agent is out! This post describes how infrastructure metrics contribute to observability, and then walks you through the steps to start sending your own Kubernetes data into Honeycomb. Follow the steps to start observing your infrastructure in production!

Kubernetes can bring a wide collection of advantages to a development organization. Properly leveraging Kubernetes can greatly improve productivity, empower you to better utilize your cloud spend, improve application stability and reliability, and more. On the flip side, if you are not properly leveraging Kubernetes, your would-be benefits become drawbacks. As a developer, this can become especially frustrating when you are focused on delivering quality code, fast.

Kubernetes and its various APIs offer a wealth of information for monitoring and observability. In a recent webinar with the CNCF (as well as a whitepaper based on that webinar), Sensu CEO Caleb Hailey goes in-depth into the most-useful APIs for cloud-native observability. In this post, we’ll focus on the Kubernetes Events API — including why it matters and how it can add context for your observability strategy.

The control plane is the brain and heart of Kubernetes. All of its components are key to the proper working and efficiency of the cluster. Monitor Kubernetes control plane is just as important as monitoring the status of the nodes or the applications running inside. It may be even more important, because an issue with the control plane will affect all of the applications and cause potential outages.

Kubernetes is increasingly becoming a uniform standard for computing – in Edge, in core and in the cloud. At NTS, we recognize this trend and have been systematically building up competencies for this core technology since 2018. As a technically-oriented business, we regularly validate different Kubernetes platforms and we share the view of many analysts (e.g. Forrester or Gartner and Gartner Hype Cycle Reports) that Rancher Labs ranks among the leading players in this sector.